Who Gets Britain’s Water?
Who Gets Britain’s Water?
by Eleanor Godwin
The summer of 2026 was the hottest ever recorded in the UK, made 130 times more likely due to human-induced climate change. However, it isn’t just the temperature that has suffered due to climate change, our water has too. England experienced its driest July since records began in 1836, receiving just 6.5mm of rain – around 10% of the long-term average. By August, more than 70% of England was officially in drought. At the beginning of September, reservoir storage stood at just 58%, almost 20% below the average for the time of year. We are at a crucial precipice when it comes to our water, and it only looks to get worse with more pressures on an already crumbling system.
Climate change is increasing temperatures and placing growing pressure on water resources. But the current crisis that climate change is causing within our water supply is also revealing fundamental issue of our failing water system. The drought we’ve experienced this summer shows what happens when a climate crisis collides with ageing infrastructure, regulatory failure, ecological degradation and growing competition for a finite resource. It also raises an increasingly important question: who gets Britain’s water in a climate-changed future?
England faces a projected 5 billion litre-per-day shortfall in public water supplies by 2055, alongside another billion litres per day potentially required by the wider economy. Yet enormous quantities of water are already being lost. Water companies in England lose approximately 2.2 billion litres every day through leaking pipes, while an estimated further 1–1.5 billion litres is lost through leaks within homes and businesses.
Despite this, the most visible response to drought is often directed at individuals. Households are asked to take shorter showers, stop watering gardens and comply with hosepipe bans. Conserving water during drought is clearly necessary. But there is a difference between asking people to conserve a scarce resource and constructing scarcity principally as a problem of individualised consumption.
The current crisis follows years of concern over sewage pollution, deteriorating rivers, inadequate infrastructure and weak regulation. Drought magnifies these failures. Low river flows reduce the dilution of pollution, while high temperatures place additional pressure on aquatic ecosystems. In August, only 9% of England’s river flows were classified as normal, while 28% were exceptionally low. Water security therefore cannot simply mean ensuring water continues to come out of the tap. It also means protecting the ecosystems upon which water supply ultimately depends.
This becomes particularly important when we consider another rapidly growing demand for water. In September 2024, the government designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, placing them alongside sectors including water and energy because of their importance to essential services and the economy. But the digital economy is not immaterial. Data centres require land, huge quantities of electricity and can consume substantial amounts of water. The government’s own National Framework for Water Resources now identifies data centres and artificial intelligence as an emerging source of water demand. Yet there remains uncertainty over how much water the sector actually consumes. In September 2026, Defra acknowledged that it was still working across government to understand data-centre water demand and how efficiency could be improved.
This creates a striking contradiction. At precisely the moment households are being told that water is scarce, the state is encouraging the expansion of a water-intensive industry as part of its strategy for AI and economic growth. The expansion of data centres raises a question that cannot be resolved through technology alone: When water becomes scarce, which uses take priority? Households? Agriculture? Industry? Data centres? Or the water that must remain in rivers, wetlands and groundwater systems to sustain functioning ecosystems? These are ultimately political decisions about the allocation of an increasingly constrained ecological resource.
The contradiction becomes even more striking when considered alongside the government’s National Security Assessment on Global Ecosystems, published in January 2026. The assessment concludes, with high confidence, that global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity. Its central proposition is remarkably clear “nature is a foundation of national security”. The assessment warns that ecosystem degradation threatens water regulation and cycling and could produce water insecurity, declining crop yields and greater competition over increasingly scarce resources.
We therefore appear to have two conceptions of critical infrastructure. The first is technological and economic where data centres are critical because digital services, AI and economic growth increasingly depend upon them. The second is ecological. Water and functioning ecosystems are critical because society itself depends upon them. Under Britain’s current neoliberal form of governance, economic demand is treated as fixed, while ecological protection remains negotiable. This needs to change.
This distinction matters because scarcity is never simply about how much water physically exists. It is also about how water is governed, distributed and wasted. Businesses already consume around 2.6 billion litres of public water each day, approximately 30% of public supply consumption. Two-thirds of that use occurs in water-stressed areas.
A litre lost through a leaking pipe, a litre used to cool a data centre, a litre used to irrigate crops, a litre consumed by a household and a litre left in a river may be physically identical. Politically, they are not. Climate adaptation requires more than new reservoirs and asking households to consume less. It requires regulatory institutions that are capable of reducing leakage, forcing infrastructure investment, protecting ecological flows and making socially-minded decisions about competing demands. For decades, environmental regulation has largely operated on the assumption that economic activity can continue expanding while environmental law manages the resulting harms. Climate change destabilises that assumption.
The drought of 2026 is more than an extreme weather event. It is a warning about what happens when climate change encounters fragile infrastructure, regulatory weakness, ecological degradation and expanding resource demand. If, as the government’s own assessment now recognises, nature is a foundation of national security, ecological protection cannot remain something considered only after decisions about growth and investment have been made. The defining question of Britain’s ecological scarcity may look deceptively simple, but it is highly politicised:
Who gets the water, and who gets to decide?