You get up and go to the loo, only to find the flush doesn’t work. You try the shower, except nothing comes out. You want a glass of water, but on turning the tap there is not a drop. Your day stumbles on, stripped of its essentials: no washing hands, no cleaning up the baby, neither tea nor coffee, no easy way to do the dishes or the laundry. Dirt accumulates; tempers fray.
The water company texts: we are so sorry; colleagues are working to restore connection; everything should soon be normal. You want to believe them, but the more it’s repeated, the more it becomes a kind of hold music. There’s no supply the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. Each morning brings with it the same chest-tightening question: what will happen today? Buckets and bottles don’t stop you feeling grubby and smelly, or from noticing the taint on your family and friends and neighbours. You’re not quite the people you thought you were and nothing feels normal.
For some of you reading this, statistics suggest the above has already happened to you, and recently. For others, the modelling implies it could soon be your future.
Last week, Tunbridge Wells went without running water for days on end, for the second time this winter. Over the course of this decade, the town has suffered a run of outages and on-off supply, or what South East Water is pleased to call “resilience issues”. The experiences above were shared by residents, including one woman who showed me some of the chats on her street’s WhatsApp group. Amid the neighbourly efforts to help one another, what jumps out is how quickly social norms break down.
Schools and GP surgeries are forced to shut, children’s birthday parties are cancelled. The WhatsApp threads almost thrum with anxiety: a bottling station has opened in this car park, the main road to another is gridlocked with queues, while yet another has run out. That Tesco has been stripped bare of water. An elderly relative who can’t carry a heavy pack of bottles leaves it on his doorstep, only to find the next morning it has been stolen. Hardly anyone goes out, and the high street turns ghostly.
One of the richest towns in one of the richest societies in human history shows the rest of us that even lavish private affluence cannot make up for the really important forms of public scarcity. Yet much of the coverage of Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead last week treated their drought as a little local bad luck. That is how Britain’s establishment likes to treat its human-made disasters – anything from unemployment to knife crime – as sad news from peripheral places. But as Mike Martin, the MP for Tunbridge Wells, observes: “South East Water may be the worst of all the water companies, but Thames Water comes second – and it serves millions of people. Water shortages will be coming to other parts of England very soon.”
They’ve already started. In 2018, the “beast from the east” meant 200,000 households got cut off. In 2023, parts of Surrey suffered an outage; in 2024, thousands of households in and around the town of Brixham in Devon had to boil their drinking water because a nasty parasite had got in through cracked pipes.
The theme here is the lack of investment, no matter how disastrous the consequences. The main water treatment works in the capital is “on its last legs”, said the chair of the Independent Water Commission, Jon Cunliffe, last summer, while publishing his review for the government of the water industry. Just one major fault at the 60-year-old plant, operated by Thames Water, and “millions of Londoners [would be] without running water”, forcing mass evacuations and the army to go on standby, says the FT.
Just how badly the privatised water industry has trashed our waterways is well known. You can’t step in the same river twice, said Heraclitus, but he has been outbid by ecologists who advise that, you know what, you might not want to step in any river in England once.
Much less covered is the prospect of parts of the country running out of water entirely, yet government officials and ministers accept it is looming, especially for London and along the east of England. Add some extra responsibility, by all means, to climate breakdown and the sprawl of housing, but 30-plus years of running the water industry for excessive returns has left us badly exposed.
Keir Starmer dreams of AI superpower status, while our ever-distracted media offers hot-and-cold running updates on the Beckhams alongside 24/7 Trumpvision. Yet the UK is lurching into a future that, when you stop to think about it, is both more alarming and remarkable: a country famous around the world for its rain imposing on itself a drought.
Here is where the massive hole in our politics opens up. The right gave us privatisation of the water industry. Margaret Thatcher promised it would bring investment and put the country’s assets in the hands of a nation of small shareholders. What it’s done is entrust our most important public goods to a bunch of hedge funds and private-equity sharks in other countries, who have siphoned off whatever returns they can get while putting barely anything back.
The result is an industry almost sinking under its own debt, often hooked for life support on loans at extortionate rates of interest (true for both small firms such as South East Water and a giant such as Thames Water). The children of Thatcher now pretend the key obstacle is a planning system that prizes bats and newts over critical infrastructure. The sad thing is they have won over government ministers, whose white paper on water this week was a pathetic attempt to rebrand our regulators, and nothing more.
The left wants to take water off the vultures and back into public ownership, and on that it has both a strong argument and overwhelming support from voters. But that still leaves the question of how to find the billions. That is addressed in an important new book, Murky water: Challenging an unsustainable system.
Written by a group of academics and researchers, it points out that our water system won’t get extra billions from zombie companies who specialise in financial engineering rather than real engineers. In the end, it will come from you and me through our water bills, just as Thames Water customers will pay extra for the super sewer for decades to come. But to make serious investment, the way we charge for water must change. Rather than the current system which, like the detested poll tax, takes too much from the poor and too little from the rich, the authors argue for more progressive bills that reflect the ability to pay.
Neither Starmer nor Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage are going to adopt these suggestions, but then the big political questions have been ducked by the big political parties for decades. But Murky water is a great challenge to a Westminster that listens to voters complaining about how nothing works, and simply asks for more patience, while making sure nothing ever changes.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
