We’re in desperate need of reservoirs

MOST of us who battled through all that incessant rainy weather back in the autumn and winter probably consoled ourselves with the thought that at least there wouldn’t be any water shortages this year.

But the pictures of depleted reservoirs are already appearing and there are worrying reports from the South East of farmers already struggling with extremely dry conditions – the result of weeks of drying winds, wall-to-wall sunshine and unseasonably high temperatures,

The picture is even worse on mainland Europe, if that’s any consolation. But farmers over there operate generally in a drier and colder environment. The UK, on the other hand, is directly in the firing line for Atlantic weather fronts which dump plentiful supplies of water on us, (even though rainfall was actually below the average last year).

So the question has to be why we are already getting twitchy about shortages later in the summer. And there are two answers: a lack of storage capacity and over-abstraction of groundwater resources.

Last time I checked it turns out we can only store around eight per cent of our rainfall in reservoirs. And there has been precious little investment in new storage capacity in recent years. New reservoirs tend to be contentious matters. There are always highly vocal pressure groups who will object to seeing any bit of countryside drowned even if it’s in the national interest and even though the result may be even more attractive than the landscape replaced.

Reservoirs take years to complete, not necessarily because they are difficult to build but because the planning process can be exploited to force lengthy (and expensive) public inquiries. If someone hit the panic button today and decided we needed a major new reservoir urgently, it would be a decade at the earliest before it was functioning.

But what is having the greatest impact of all is the huge surge in house building we have seen over the last couple of decades, apparently to satisfy some identified demand.

And it’s no longer enough to build a dozen or so houses: new estates of 6,000 homes are appearing in many places. That’s 6,000 new roofs, 6,000

it new driveways, thousands of miles of new Tarmac roads all diverting rainfall into the drains and onto the rivers and the sea. And thousands of new consumers all drawing on groundwater sources on which farmers rely.

No wonder I am getting reports from a broad swathe of the country from Hampshire across to Kent of severely depleted aquifers, and of frightening soil moisture deficits. On the one hand we are preventing more rainwater from finding its way down to natural underground storage and on the other we are allowing that storage to be plundered to supply new housing developments.

This situation is completely unsustainable and can only lead to very severe consequences. Rather than using the planning laws to force developers to make contributions to new roads and for other infrastructure improvements, we should be following the lead of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and other countries and taking money off them to pay for water retention schemes which ensure groundwater supplies are constantly replenished.

I’d go further than that, diverting the money into a national fund which can help us either build the new reservoirs we desperately need or to fund the long-promised national water grid to channel supplies from the wetter North and West to the drier South and East and to avert the dustbowl conditions that are already threatening to develop there becoming reality.