Water company CEOs try to woo me, but I’ve got only one message for them: do your jobs

theguardian.com:

It came to me while I was standing on a river bank. It was such a ridiculous, nonsensical idea that I instantly tried to dismiss it. But it was like the wiggliest of wiggly earworms that just won’t leave you alone, like a tune that just keeps boring its way into your mind. That melody was: London is running out of drinking water.

Don’t take my word for it. Try the National Audit Office, which looked into the country’s looming water crisis two years ago and concluded: “If more concerted action is not taken now, parts of the south and south-east of England will run out of water within the next 20 years.” And it’s not just London – the same report warned that water shortages are an impending risk for all of the UK.

Then there’s John Armitt, the chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, who just this week told the Guardian that the government’s approach to keeping our nation’s taps running amounted to nothing more than “keeping [its] fingers crossed”. And the public accounts committee, which has berated the government for allowing water companies in England to leak more than 3bn litres of water a day from their badly maintained, underinvested, creaking network of pipes.

How on earth did we ever manage to get ourselves in a position where England is looking at a water shortfall of 4bn litres a day by 2050? And while I’m thinking about it, can someone please explain to me why over the past two years we have allowed water companies to spend almost 6m hours on 775,704 separate occasions dumping sewage into England’s rivers? It’s an act of environmental destruction so wide reaching that not a single river in the country is currently listed as being in “good” overall environmental health. Every single river is polluted and one