Tim Smedley’s long read on the state of water resources in the UK was very dispiriting (Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic, 15 June). That something as basic as water is being mismanaged, and has been for decades, is shocking. This is especially so given that our taxes fund expert regulators to act on our behalf and oversee this resource, and the water companies that provide the services.
When the head of the Environment Agency confessed that our resource management systems were more than 50 years old, it was like saying our businesses are still running on typewriters and carbon paper. It is made more depressing because I spent a career in the water sector, including decades in developing countries. Specialists in all these countries know there are cost-effective solutions, but the problem is rarely technical or financial.
The problem is a political class that seems unable or unwilling to grapple with these issues and address them in any coherent manner.
Bill Kingdom
Oxford
• Your long read is a welcome wake-up call on the wastage of water. Yes, yet another one. I remember going to university in 1976 and being told to bring water carriers for use at the standpipes (in the event, they weren’t needed).
The article says regenerative agriculture has “begun to attract attention”. That may be true, but it was a big feature of Cop15 in Paris, proposed by the French minister for agriculture; everyone said what a good idea it was, and then everyone ignored it.
A lot of the pledges and a lot of the boasted improvements have no monitoring, no holding to account, and are therefore useless (think UK marine reserves continuing to be trawled).
Duncan Stephenson
Leeds
• Thanet is more than twice as densely populated and with less rainfall than south-east England as a whole. Our water (93% of it) comes from the aquifer of chalk that comprises most of the Isle of Thanet. Yet Southern Water, the supplier, cannot predict how much water remains. We came close to drought last year and have recently had outages due to underinvestment.
Global warming of glaciers is providing more water – and we are surrounded by it on two sides – but it is seawater. Your article did not mention desalination to solve the problem of drought. Nano-filtration of seawater is energy-expensive, but we have a potential power supply from tidal flow at the same location. Pumping desalinated water to a leaky lake at the highest point of the peninsula, conveniently situated on the disused airfield, would act as a reservoir and allow replenishment of the aquifer.
Richard Symonds
Broadstairs, Kent
• Tim Smedley’s article on the risks of a lack of water conservation rang lots of bells. We installed a rainwater-gathering system when we built our house in 1998 (instead of the customary soakaway that is still the norm, 25 years later). It flushes our loos and feeds outside taps for watering the garden.
At the time I tried to persuade the planning department of west Norfolk to introduce the concept as a pilot scheme. It refused because it wasn’t national policy. I thought it would be good, for once, to do something that put us ahead of the game, rather than waiting until the streams run dry.
Jonathan Toye
Downham Market, Norfolk
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