25
Examination of witnesses
Rob Lawson, Professor Jim Hall and Dr Chris Counsell.
Q51 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to the Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee. Today is the third session in our inquiry into drought preparedness, and we are delving into long-term water supply and demand. I should remind everyone that the session is being webcast live and that a transcript will be taken and made public. Witnesses will be able to make minor amendments.
May I warmly welcome our witnesses for today’s session and thank them for taking the time to be with us today? I invite you to introduce yourselves very briefly.
Rob Lawson: I am here representing CIWEM. I am the chair of the CIWEM water resources technical panel.
Professor Jim Hall: I am professor of climate and environmental risks at the University of Oxford. Until very recently, I was president of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission.
Dr Chris Counsell: Good morning, everyone. I am a technical director in the water and climate group at HR Wallingford, and work in the water resources industry with water companies and regulators.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Before moving on to questions, may I remind everyone that any relevant interest should be declared the first time that they speak?
Q52 Lord Mancroft: Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. We have come to the conclusion that we should start this by jumping in at the deep end, so could I ask you how resilient the current water system is to future droughts? How has resilience evolved in recent years, or has it not?
Professor Jim Hall: In terms of how resilience has evolved, maybe we should rewind to immediately post privatisation. In the subsequent decades, water resources planning has been in a reasonably steady state, with the assumption that this system needed to be adapted a bit but not a great deal.
When the Committee on Climate Change was created in 2008, along with the adaptation committee that Lord Krebs chaired, there was growing awareness of the impacts of climate change on water resources alongside other drivers on demand and the needs of the environment. The wake-up call, I would say, was in 2012, when, after two dry years, we were going into the Olympics and the possibility of severe water shortages. As your Lordships will recall, it then started raining. That really did raise awareness of the potential major economic, social and political impacts of a drought.
The water industry was asked to do new analysis and, in 2016, Water UK published a national analysis of the resilience of water supplies. Subsequently, in 2018, the National Infrastructure Commission published its analysis of drought risk. The commission looked very seriously at what some of the implications of a large-scale, severe drought would be, and concluded that the system was not sufficiently resilient, given the potential consequences of that. It was that analysis that led to the proposal that we should be resilient to a one-in-500-year drought—a drought with an annual probability of 0.2%—which is a higher standard than most systems in the country at that time were at.
Since then, that has become the standard and has driven many of the things that we are now seeing in the industry. The commission recommended a three-pronged approach of new infrastructure for water supply—reservoirs, transfers, desalination and wastewater reuse—further action on leakage, and action on the demand side. It is that three-pronged approach that has really been taken forward since then and we see materialising in the 2024 water resource management plans.
Dr Chris Counsell: I would add a couple of points just to expand on that. Our system is much more connected than it has been in the past, and we could readily cope with a drought such as the one in 1976, or the one in 1995-96 that we experienced in Yorkshire. The challenge is understanding what future droughts might look like under climate change. The current climate models still struggle to fully capture what those droughts might look like, so there is a lot of uncertainty there.
The current resilience is based on the current set-up of the system, which involves taking more water out of the environment than we would perhaps like. There is a move to take some of those groundwater abstractions away, and that water needs to be replaced, but that would also influence the types of events that we would be vulnerable to.
Our resilience is also linked to the demands that we place on that system. Those demands are changing in terms of public water supplies but also other sectors. All those aspects will affect our resilience to future droughts.
Rob Lawson: If I can pick up a few points as well, Chris mentioned resilience to droughts. One of the biggest issues experienced in 2022 was that we hit 40 degrees centigrade for the first time in recorded history in the UK. The Met Office has shown that that level of temperature would not be possible without climate change. Water demand is broadly proportional to temperature, so a higher frequency of higher temperatures will put more pressure on the water resources system than we have seen in the past.
We are also seeing a wider variety of hot-dry or drought events than we have seen in the past. You can compare the very sharp peaks driven by those high temperatures in 2022 with the long dry period that we had in 2018. Every drought is different, and the dry weather that we have had this year is different again. The duration, the frequency and the magnitude of those droughts are very much climate-driven and that is an area of uncertainty.
Lord Mancroft: Professor Hall, you referred to the one-in-500-year metric. Is that a useful measure of resilience in this day and age?
Professor Jim Hall: Yes, it is, and it has been well received by the water industry. There is some small print, with some provisos, that comes with the way in which we use that metric, because we are talking about droughts that have not been observed but are based on modelling. To use it, there has to be an agreed method of what we understand by that.
Water companies need to analyse the range of possible ways in which they might respond to a drought such as that, as well as the different measures that they have at their disposal. It should be taken as being a stress test, not a way of dictating how you respond to it.
Lord Mancroft: I have heard responses from other people who have come to talk about this. When you have a drought on, there is not much that you can do to respond to it, is there? You cannot make it rain; you cannot do rain dancing. Responding to a drought, if you have one, is a bit late. The question that we are asking—and this is the whole purpose of this committee—is whether we are in a position where we are responding to it now. Are we resilient? Are we in trouble or are we doing the right things?
Professor Jim Hall: Just to come back on your first point, there are measures. I absolutely agree with you that we should not be having to rely on those measures, but, as Rob will explain, one can seek to reduce water demand somewhat in droughts. There are emergency drought permits and orders that mean that more water could be taken from the environment. There are also emergency sources of water.
All of that needs to be factored in to the way in which we understand the resilience of the system. Resilience is to do with being able to cope during an event, as well as holding off the event from happening to start with. I also absolutely agree that the main investment here and the main policy interventions need to be up front to reduce the likelihood of droughts happening.
Rob Lawson: I would agree with that as well.
Q53 Lord Duncan of Springbank: Chris, you mentioned modelling. I am struck by the shortcomings of the modelling, because a lot of the Government’s thinking about investment, datacentres and various other extractive industries will, presumably, be based upon some degree of modelling. What are the confidence levels that you have in the modelling, and what do you do to mitigate, within the models, what could well be substantial risks in given areas?
Dr Chris Counsell: We have made a lot of progress with the models in recent times. They are much more sophisticated and we do a lot more diverse testing, so a more diverse set of droughts are pushed through those models, but some challenges remain. There could be better sharing of datasets. One of the challenges around datacentres is knowing exactly where they will be located.
Lord Duncan of Springbank: That sharing is between which groups?
Dr Chris Counsell: It would be sharing between the regulators, private companies and water companies. There are often some commercial sensitivities around things such as datacentres. If we move to hydrogen production, for example, knowing exactly where they will be located is really key to being able to do effective planning. Otherwise, if you do things at a high, national scale, you can mask local issues, or perhaps even overstate things somewhere.
The models are increasingly complex, which can make them more difficult to share and to explain to stakeholders. We need to bring everyone with us, whether it is agriculture, energy or the public, build confidence in the modelling that we are doing, and make it as accessible as possible as part of that, but that gets quite difficult with the complexities of the models that we are now using.
Rob Lawson: You have highlighted, and Chris has echoed, the challenges around datacentres, but also hydrogen production and carbon capture and storage. They are all relatively new technologies that are not widely used—well, datacentres are—but the growth is seen to be huge. That is probably where the greatest uncertainty is in demand forecasts. There is some uncertainty in population and property forecasts in a household context, but those are more easily predictable and more manageable in a piecemeal way.
It is those big binary decisions that either happen in an area or do not, where you have, say, a hyperscale datacentre or a hydrogen production site that will have a big influence on demand in a particular area and, therefore, on the resilience of the system in that area to meet that demand.
Q54 Earl Russell: Good morning, gentlemen. I declare my interest as a non-executive director and board member of the Water Retail Company. I wanted to ask you about the relationship between a one-in-500-year event and the background of a changing and warming climate. My question is around the interplay between those two and whether that model holds true. If we continually have drier and warmer winters and summers, year after year, we have heard that that can impact water, particularly groundwater. We may not hit that one-in-500-year threshold, but we might, in terms of a slow death, find that we live in a fundamentally different, changed climate and that our water planning is not fit for purpose. Is there a word on that?
Professor Jim Hall: The first thing to be clear about is that what we understand by a one-in-500-year event changes through time. If we are in a climate that is hotter and drier on average, the one-in-500-year scenario becomes more severe as well, and so we need to take that into account when we are planning.
The other thing that you were indicating there is that, unlike a flood, for example, which is a relatively short-lived event, the severity of a drought depends on preceding and antecedent conditions, usually over a period of years. As you say, we need to monitor what is going on with the trend, as well as looking at the severity of that extreme heat and dry event, which leads to the worst conditions during the drought.
Dr Chris Counsell: Future droughts are very problematic to understand. If you think about those multiyear events of successive dry winters, that is where our climate models really struggle to reproduce. At the moment, the techniques that we apply are to assume, essentially, that those big droughts change in the same way that the climate models say that mean climate will change, whereas that may not be the case.
My own thoughts are that any future climate projections that we produce in this country should have a better focus on droughts in particular, given their consequences and our lack of understanding of how the climate might change and affect droughts in this country.
Q55 Lord Krebs: I should mention that I was the chair of the adaptation committee, and Jim was a member of the committee during all the eight years that I was chair. I just wanted to ask Rob a follow-up question. You said that demand is proportional, roughly speaking, to temperature. I wonder whether you could send us a graph of demand against temperature and, in that, indicate whether temperature is measured on a daily basis or a monthly basis, or over what timescale.
Rob Lawson: Yes, I certainly can. I said “roughly proportionate”. I would qualify that, given your follow-up, Lord Krebs, with the point that there probably are thresholds and steps. There are various theories and pieces of evidence around that. I know from work that my company is doing at the moment that there is evidence from some water companies, and also from work that we have been doing at a national scale, that could support that.
Q56 The Chair: Before we move to Lord Jay, I am afraid I have a quick supplementary on the one-in-500-year metric, which I am struggling to understand. How do we know that a one-in-500-year drought event is occurring? Would that be something that you would call a flash drought event? How do we know that it is happening? How do we know that, this coming summer, we are not going to be in a one-in-500-year event?
Professor Jim Hall: We can assess that only with the benefit of hindsight. Pretty much once the event is done, we can do the statistical analysis to see how it compares with other severe drought events. Unfortunately, one of the issues with drought is that, as you go into it, you do not know how severe it is going to get.
Dr Chris Counsell: You have to be very careful when talking about one-in-500-year events, because droughts can vary in spatial and temporal scale. It depends on what you are looking at. How big an area, what timeframes and what metric, so whether you are looking at rainfall, river flow or reservoir storage, can all influence what your estimate of a one-in-500-year event is. There is a lot of uncertainty around those higher-return periods.
The Chair: Just to be clear, this measure of resilience is not linked to a clearly defined set of indicators that might inform future planning.
Dr Chris Counsell: At the moment, in public water supplies, it is linked to system consequences.
Professor Jim Hall: If I might come back on that, one in 500 years was set as a headline for resilience. It was then set to hydrologists and the industry to identify a range of very severe conditions that were consistent with one in 500. Those are then being used reasonably consistently across the industry to do that stress testing and to raise standards within water resources. Even though, as we have heard, there are a series of complexities associated with that, we have set a higher bar and are working out the standard of how you achieve that. I think that is the right way to proceed.
The Earl of Leicester: Does one in 500 mean that water will stop coming out of taps in villages and towns, or for industry and farm animals? Surely, that is the result.
Rob Lawson: I am not an expert on the relationship between the one-in-500-year threshold and the drought levels that water companies operate to. At level 4, which is an emergency situation where water companies might be looking at standpipes, rota cuts and so on, that is the situation where you would be experiencing no water from your tap. For me, the challenge of that for water companies from an operational point of view is enormous in terms of having to face extensive management of the system, individual household boundary valves, and all that kind of thing.
The Chair: We will have a whole session on agriculture and will park that question for then.
Lord Lennie: When you look back to do your modelling, what is the nearest that we have come to one in 500 so far?
Rob Lawson: It was probably 1976.
Lord Lennie: What was your assessment for that? Was that one in 200 or one in 500?
Dr Chris Counsell: It generally seems to be around a one-in-100-year type of event. In some areas, it would be even before 1976, going back to the 1920s. In Yorkshire, it was 1995-96.
Baroness Whitaker: Is this a probability index based on the past trend, or does it have more than that in it to calculate differences that will be happening in the future?
Dr Chris Counsell: It has more than that. It is a more diverse set of droughts beyond just those in historic records.
Professor Jim Hall: We can come back with a statistical analysis of past droughts, including ones in the 19th century, which were very severe. We can get the numbers on that.
Lord Mancroft: Was 1976 worse than this year?
The Chair: We need to move on to Lord Jay’s question. Lord Mancroft, we have another hour to go. You will have an opportunity, I am sure, to ask your question.
Q57 Lord Jay of Ewelme: Thank you very much for being with us today. As I understand it, there has not been any new water supply infrastructure built since the 1990s, but the Government have said that they have proposals for building nine new reservoirs. Some of those are pretty controversial, and much will depend on whether the planning system allows them to be built. Assuming that they are, will they meet the likely demand for the future?
Professor Jim Hall: The first thing to say is that there have not been any new reservoirs for 30 years. There have been other new supply-side investments, for example on groundwater. There is a desalination plant, along with new water abstractions and treatment. There has been some investment, but you are absolutely right that the scale of water supply investment proposed now is on a much bigger scale than has taken place over the last 30 years or so.
As I said in my introduction, addressing the risk of droughts is not just to do with action on the supply side. As I said, the National Infrastructure Commission said broadly a third on supply, a third on demand and a third on leakage. In fact, the latest version of the National Framework for Water Resources has refined those proportions a bit. The estimate is that there could be a deficit of about 5,000 megalitres per day. The proposal is that about 1,700 megalitres of that will come from new water resources and new supply, about 890 megalitres a day from leakage, and 2,500 megalitres on the demand side. The expectation in the plan is that a lot of the heavy lifting will be done on the demand side as well.
Rob Lawson: Yes, particularly in the early years, because, for the reservoirs that are planned and, as you say, subject to planning processes, the construction and the consents, et cetera, tend to come online towards the end of the next decade, so in the late 2030s or 2040 timeframe. The demand-side measures will need to account for up to 80% of the supply-demand gap over the next 10 to 15 years.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: We have two issues here. One is what we do before reservoirs come into operation. That is a really serious issue for the next 10 years. Then we have, with any luck, new reservoirs coming into operation in 10-plus years.
Professor Jim Hall: Yes.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Are we able to judge how water resources are assessed in the future? Do we have the ability to do that?
Dr Chris Counsell: We do. We still have some challenges around those future droughts and climate models, but we have the tools and techniques to do those assessments. In the area that Rob mentioned of datacentres and non-household demand, we need to do more work to understand what that might look like, so that we can do those future assessments more robustly and support growth and infrastructure, as well as supporting leaving more water in the environment. We have the right tools. It is more about the data and the climate model outputs.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Whose job is it to do this work, for example, on working out what the demand will be from datacentres and whether, as some have said, that demand will decline over time as datacentre technology advances?
Rob Lawson: The water companies have a statutory obligation to develop water resource management plans, and they do that every five years. It is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. It is an ongoing, never-ending process. The five-yearly cycle is positive in a number of ways and allows for a degree of adaptive planning to adjust and modify plans quite frequently.
On datacentres, the water companies have an obligation to produce a demand forecast, and have to understand and assess the uncertainties associated with that. As I said earlier, those non-household business and commercial-side developments that we talked about are probably the area of greatest uncertainty and unknowns, for the reasons that you have highlighted, in terms of the cooling technology, the scale of the development of AI and datacentre requirements, as well as the pace of the move towards net zero through clean, fossil fuel-free technologies.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Are there any other comments on that?
Dr Chris Counsell: A key question that we need to address is that there is a challenge between providing resilience, supporting growth, and protecting and leaving enough water in the environment. We have to work out, over these 15 years before the reservoirs get built, how we manage that journey through those challenges.
Professor Jim Hall: In response to your question around how we are doing with the water resource planning process, I agree with Chris that capability has really built up and we are in a good place. There are a few things that I am keeping an eye on. One is the difference between what is planned and what is happening. Companies’ plans include targets for leakage reduction and demand reduction. In recent years, both of those things have improved, but not as much as the targets, and so there is a question of whether that is the right basis for planning. Are you planning on your targets or are you planning based on what you know reality to be?
There is, as Chris has said, the question around how sure we are about the regulation of the environment and whether we are setting the right targets in that sense. There is a persistent use of the word “headroom” and this notion that there needs to be some kind of gap between supply and demand. Personally, I would like to banish that from the whole planning process, because it is poorly understood and is used in a number of different ways in different contexts.
Q58 Lord Duncan of Springbank: One of the challenges of reservoirs is that you have to place them in certain areas, but much of the demand is not going to be in those areas; it is going to be elsewhere. We were hearing last week about datacentres that have to be near centres of population, which, traditionally, are not where your largest reservoirs could be, simply by dint of geomorphology and geology. How do you reconcile the two? Is it better to create smaller-scale reservoirs near where you have the demand, or to configure your datacentres somewhere where you are likely to have the prospect of reservoirs?
Professor Jim Hall: There are some pretty tricky trade-offs in all of that. You can, of course, build reservoirs in lowland areas. England is planning to. The Thames Water reservoir will be in the lowlands, so it can be done. Datacentres are also a trade-off. Not everything needs very low latency. You could train AI in Scotland, because the data does not have to move back and forth particularly quickly.
The third thing I wanted to say is that there is more emphasis on connecting up the water system and moving water around. That is an energy-intensive thing to be doing, but it is certainly part of the process of building resilience.
Lord Duncan of Springbank: Are we moving water around in quite that way and at that scale? Scotland always wants to move water south and never seems to get to, for example.
Dr Chris Counsell: We are not moving it at that scale, and there are lots of issues when you do that in terms of mixing different sources of water and the energy costs, but we are more connected than we have ever been, for sure.
Rob Lawson: There are some schemes in the proposals that have gone through the RAPID—Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development—process, which is a gated process for the reservoirs that you have mentioned, as well as large transfer schemes and other large infrastructure schemes for water that include inter-basin and inter-catchment transfers between the Severn and the Thames. That starts to link up some of the resources in the upper Severn catchment, which are the Victorian reservoirs of Elan Valley, Vyrnwy and so on, into the Thames valley and the demand centres.
Q59 Lord Lennie: There is the bigger economic question about where you put datacentres. The Government will be thinking about where they want jobs to be. Where unemployment is high, in Scotland, the north of England or Northumberland, where I live, we will take them. There is plenty of water, plenty of space and plenty of people, many of whom are not working.
Professor Jim Hall: The other consideration is energy. There is a direct trade-off between energy and water here. You can have very water-efficient datacentres using different cooling technologies that are energy-intensive.
Q60 Earl Russell: Excuse me for being blunt, but you have given me an answer for the problem as we are now. Is the truth not that we should have done more in the past, that we are facing a warming climate and a series of problems, and that the predicted water shortages by 2055 are quite alarming? That is a blunt question. Would it not be better if we had done more before, and are we not a bit behind the curve? I recognise that there is investment in infrastructure, but moving water around does not help if everywhere is in drought, for example. Is this not really quite urgent now?
Rob Lawson: It is. This is a bit like the question, “When is the best time to plant a tree?” It should have been done 10 years ago, but we are where we are and we have to act now. The overall picture that we have through the National Framework for Water Resources, and the ongoing review of water resource plans and so on, from my perspective, as someone who has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, is probably as strong and clear a situation that needs urgent action as it has ever been.
That is built on a huge amount of work that Chris has described in terms of climate modelling, hydrological analysis, water resources analysis and demand forecasting, which is also probably better and more complete than it has ever been.
Earl Russell: That is welcome.
Rob Lawson: The signal and the call are there, and it is up to us to respond. As Jim said, Jean Spencer, who is chair of the National Framework for Water Resources, said that we are very good at making plans and now is the time to implement them. I would say that that is very true.
Q61 The Chair: Before we move to Lord Krebs’s question, I apologise, but I have a question to ask on water resource management plans and their role in forward planning. The Cunliffe review raised concerns about the lack of a statutory requirement for these plans to deliver on what they have laid out. The review said, “despite extensive planning frameworks for water resources, there appears to be a gap between planning and delivery of new water supply infrastructure”, basically because the WRMPs do not have a requirement to deliver their plans. Can I have a quick comment on that? Is that a serious failing or gap in the system?
Professor Jim Hall: In a sense, Rob pretty much just underlined that things have not been delivered, as the Cunliffe report pointed out, because of the way in which the regulatory process combines the water resource management planning with the company business planning, which, ultimately, decides what the companies can invest in.
The Chair: Who is responsible for delivering the WRMPs?
Rob Lawson: It is a good question. They are the water companies’ documents; they are the water companies’ plans. Therefore, from the household point of view, where water companies have a statutory duty to supply households, it is their responsibility. They also have a responsibility, from a wider economic point of view, to provide those fundamental resources to the economy, to business and so on.
I would go back to what I said previously, which is that these are and have always been, to some extent, adaptive plans. Where previously we have had plans saying, “We definitely need this reservoir in 2020, 2030 or 2040”, it is a different situation when you get five years down the line. That, combined with the challenges of planning and delivering these large infrastructure projects, has caused things not to happen.
Lord Ashcombe: Does the regulator allow the water companies to do what they need to do in that respect?
Rob Lawson: I mentioned RAPID earlier, which is an alliance between Ofwat and the Environment Agency. It has provided a step change in that. That is the regulator working much more closely in step with the water companies to deliver these large reservoir projects and other major infrastructure projects.
Q62 Lord Krebs: We have been told in earlier sessions that it is not that the amount of rain falling out of the sky has changed or is changing, but that it is becoming lumpier. There are longer periods when there is no rain, and then very heavy rain, or there is geographical variation. In light of that, I wondered what your comments are about the need to collect and harvest rainwater when it falls. To quote from the Horticultural Trades Association, “It is completely unacceptable that we are allowing valuable autumn and winter rain to, quite literally, pour down the drain”. Is there something that we can do on the supply side with harvesting and storing rainwater?
While you are considering that, other options for supply-side management might include water reuse, which we have not yet talked about. You have mentioned desalination, so perhaps you could say a bit more about whether that has a significant role.
Finally, one bit of evidence that we have had refers to tidal abstraction. When the Environment Agency has determined that water cannot be abstracted from rivers any more, because there is a minimum residual flow requirement, there is, nevertheless, some water flowing down the river and eventually into the sea. Could some of that be harvested at the interface between the river and the sea?
Professor Jim Hall: Maybe I will pass to Rob in relation to the household versions of rainwater harvesting. Just to comment on the preamble, remember that droughts are not just about rain. In a sense, what we know about temperature is much more certain in the future. We know that average temperatures are going up. What is happening to rainfall, as you have said, is much more variable. We can be confident, in that sense, that there is going to be a lot more evapotranspiration in the future.
We are also reasonably confident that rainfall will become more variable. Of course, that is what storage on all of its scales is about. The biggest form of rainwater harvesting is a reservoir. There are major reservoir investments planned, as you know.
One sometimes hears speculation in the press around, “Could we build a barrage across the Wash?” or the possibilities of trapping more rainwater. There are big issues there around, as we have said, the cost of storage in the lowlands and the quality of some of the water that we are talking about here. A big downpour of water typically washes off a lot of pollutants very rapidly, and that water may not be treatable, so having all this rain flowing around may not be what we need in terms of water resources.
Desalination and wastewater reuse are really very much part of what is being planned in the future. There are parts of the country, in the east and in the south, where, basically, there will be no further withdrawal of water from the environment. That is it in terms of getting water from the environment. In that case, wastewater reuse and desalination become the ways in which any increase in demand is going to be addressed.
Dr Chris Counsell: I would just add to the reservoir piece there. There are some cases where abstraction licences prevent water companies taking excess water during winter, when it could be used. While there are sometimes water quality issues, at other times there are not, but the licence prevents them taking that water. That is something that we could look at. Where we are looking to leave water in at low flows, perhaps we give a bit more flexibility at higher flow periods to make sure that those reservoirs are as full as they can be at the start of the drawdown seasons.
Lord Krebs: Is the ban on abstraction during autumn and winter rains in order to enable groundwater to recover? Why does the Environment Agency impose those restrictions?
Dr Chris Counsell: It is partly a legacy of the licence and partly to do with quality issues, but there are ways around some of those. It has not been needed in the past, but we recognise now that we do need to make as much use as we can of those winter rains.
Rob Lawson: On the options for rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling at a household or property level, there is lots of potential for datacentres, where cooling water is required, to do rainwater harvesting. They are ideal in terms of roof area versus the quality required and the ability to recycle that water several times. That is definitely something that smaller datacentres with traditional water cooling could benefit from.
For households, the unit cost and the cost per megalitre of installing or retrofitting rainwater harvesting to existing properties is at least two and possibly three orders of magnitude higher than the more common interventions that you see at the moment, such as home water audits, retrofitting, repairing leaky loos, and all those sorts of things. That is probably prohibitively expensive and unlikely to happen without significant intervention from government or similar to subsidise that kind of activity.
It could be a lot more cost-effective on a new build and, in my view, should be on a par with solar panels, EV charging, bike lanes and so forth in terms of a mandatory requirement on new developments to have either individual household or collective rainwater harvesting or greywater recycling systems for non-potable uses.
Lord Krebs: Would any of you like to comment on tidal abstraction, which was the last thing that I mentioned? Is that credible as a contributor to the supply side?
Professor Jim Hall: For desalination, the energy requirements depend on the salinity of the water. For sure, there is an advantage in putting desalination plants up in estuaries where the salinity is lower. As for whether you would then operate that with the tide, we would have to look into that further, because these plants tend to work better if they are run at a steady rate rather than being switched on and off as the tide goes in and out.
Q63 Lord Trees: Thank you very much for coming and talking to us. We have talked a bit about the need to increase catchment and reservoirs, and we have touched on moving water. Can I ask you to comment on canals? We have an incredible system of canals in the UK. Is there scope to use them as catchments, where you catch water in one part of the canal and make it available for consumption elsewhere? Is this not a potential resource? The Romans built aqueducts. We built canals 100 or more years ago. Is there some scope for exploiting that? If not, what are the impediments?
Rob Lawson: Canals are being considered as part of the supply-side solutions that are included in the figures that both Jim and I are looking at from the national framework summary. The Grand Union Canal transfer is definitely on the table as a solution.
There are some challenges from an engineering point of view in terms of the capacity of the canal, the fact that you are increasing flows, which could have an impact on the traffic in the canal, and the need to get around lock systems. Canals are also subject to drought as much as other resources are. We saw recently that 20% of the Canal and River Trust network had to be shut because of insufficient water supplies.
The answer is yes. Canals are definitely seen as part of the solution, and there is a lot of work going into the feasibility of their use for water resources.
Q64 The Earl of Leicester: As per my register of interests, I am a farmer and landowner in the east of England. With regard to tidal abstraction, we have built four agricultural reservoirs that are all filled from winter flow of two small rivers—the Burn and the Stiffkey. The extraction points are about a mile from the estuary. That is just a comment. It is great that the Environment Agency gave us those licences for winter abstraction when, normally, there is a decent amount of water in the river. I should imagine and hope that that is mirrored around the coast of Britain. Also, a lot of farmers are using rainwater harvest, because cows drink a lot of water and it is expensive to buy it.
Rob Lawson: You provided there a perfect example of a very obvious way of utilising water that would otherwise run to the sea and be lost. It should be more widely used. For agricultural purposes, it is a prime example of where there could be more use of that resource, particularly in East Anglia and other lowland areas.
Q65 Lord Layard: Going back to this discussion of different methods of increasing supply, is there a systematic way in which the comparative costs of dealing with this problem are being compared? It would be very helpful to us to have some numbers rather than just qualitative expressions of the cost of desalination and harvesting, et cetera, as compared with reservoirs. This is central to how to think about the whole supply side.
On the demand side, you were saying that this is going to be a very big feature over the next few years. Could you say what the changes in the demand framework comprise? What is your view on the role of price in affecting the demand? There are two separate questions—one on cost and one on demand.
Professor Jim Hall: On the supply side, you will be pleased to hear that a lot of optimisation goes on in terms of trading off the costs of different supply-side interventions with the amount of water that you get out of them. It is quite place and context-specific, because it depends on how much water is available in the environment, and what the quality and the variability of that water is.
There is also the question that has now surfaced in relation to the south Oxfordshire reservoir of whether the costs that were used at the planning point are consistent. Now that it is being looked at more carefully as an actual construction project, the cost estimates have gone up significantly. There is a genuine question around how robust the costs are that are being used when we are analysing supply-side options.
Lord Layard: Is there any way in which you can give us some information? I realise that a lot of this is very local, but could you give us some numbers just to get a bit of a hold on this? When we are told that desalination is too expensive, could you give us some numbers in order to compare that with reservoirs, for example?
Professor Jim Hall: Yes, we can provide some numbers on that.
Dr Chris Counsell: I do not have them to hand, but they are there and have been calculated. These plans are benchmarked by the Environment Agency to look at the different costs of options to get an idea of what the unit costs are, typically for reservoirs and desal.
The Chair: Thank you. That would be really welcome.
Lord Layard: Could I just finish on the demand side?
Rob Lawson: There are a number of interventions that are becoming more important and will remain so over the next 10 to 15 years before the reservoirs come on stream. The key one is smart metering, which is probably familiar from an energy point of view, but delivering that for water so that customers have a view of what water they are using on a day-to-day basis. It also enables water companies to identify leaks on the customer side and to obtain access to some really low-hanging fruit. We talk about the cost per unit to go and mend a leaky loo or fix a supply pipe leak. Knowing exactly which property that is on is a real game-changer that smart metering provides.
At the moment, the rates of smart metering are about 12% nationwide, but that is predominated by Thames Water and Anglian Water, which have led the charge, if you like, through the last AMP, or investment period, up to now. The forecast is that smart metering will achieve around 75% penetration by 2040, and that is expected to have a significant impact—I do not have the number in front of me—in terms of reducing demand.
The Chair: We are going to move on to a question on leakages and a series of questions on demand. Lord Ashcombe?
Q66 Lord Ashcombe: Thank you for coming, as others have said. Some 19% of the public water supply is currently lost through leakage. That is, effectively, two months of every year of water usage, which I would have thought is a pretty phenomenal amount. What action is needed to reduce this leakage, and what are the barriers? Chris, you were going to try to answer my earlier question a bit further about whether regulators work with the water companies on that, so you might like to just think about that one as well.
Dr Chris Counsell: In terms of leakage, you are right. The rates are around 20%. The barriers to addressing leakage include the cost. Some of this ageing infrastructure is very hard and very expensive to fix, so that has been one of the challenges. There is a lot of innovation happening in this space in terms of working out where those leaks are and how to renovate that infrastructure. There is a national leakage test centre being constructed at HR Wallingford next year, which will allow different products to be tested and tried out in order to help with that innovation that we need and to make the progress that we need to make at scale. As Jim mentioned earlier, we have not really been hitting the targets that we have been setting up to now, so we need a real step change in this area.
Rob Lawson: Leakage is and remains a problem. There is good progress, though. Leakage reduced by about 10% to the end of last year.
Lord Ashcombe: From when—year on year?
Rob Lawson: No, a total reduction of 10% over the last AMP period, which is the largest reduction since 2000.
Lord Ashcombe: That is from when to when?
Rob Lawson: It is from 2019-20 to 2024-25.
Lord Ashcombe: So 10% over five years.
Rob Lawson: Yes. The water resource management plans show that, if companies can deliver, they will be on track to achieve the 50% reduction in leakage that is committed to within the environmental improvement plan under the Environment Act.
Water UK did a leakage route map a couple of years ago, which showed that the leakage targets are achievable. Cost is a definite challenge and there are definitely pressures, if you will forgive the pun, on cost. The droughts that we have seen recently have led to summer breakouts, not just winter breakouts, from freeze-thaw events. That can only increase with more severe droughts.
There is a definite need for more innovation and collaboration. The solutions rely on things such as smart metering, not just in households but throughout the network, which enables water companies to pinpoint leaks more exactly. We also need to optimise pressure management. There is a relationship between the pressure in the network and the magnitude of the leaks. With smart pressure management that maintains service levels at the customer’s tap, but does not put too much of a burden on the infrastructure, it is possible to reduce leaks in that way.
Things such as mains replacement are a much smaller part of the package of solutions for leakage than those smart, innovative approaches, but will require more investment.
Lord Ashcombe: I do a lot of work from an insurance perspective with oil companies, particularly pipeline companies in the United States, which are shifting oil from northern Canada to the south of the United States. They have systems where they can find a leak and get it turned off in seconds. Is that something that we are looking to go towards for water? It is an equally valuable resource, and rather more so, I would argue. They are miles ahead of the water industry because of the environmental effects that leaking oil can have.
Professor Jim Hall: The National Infrastructure Commission made a number of recommendations with respect to asset management across infrastructure sectors, but including the water sector. In water, there needs to be a much more forward-looking way of measuring and reporting on asset health.
Right now, the standard reporting is on frequency of pipe bursts and so on, whereas the sector needs to get into a position perhaps rather more analogous to the oil and gas sector—as well as the offshore wind sector and the aviation sector—which is doing much more in the way of predictive asset management and optimisation of interventions within the system, so that you are intervening in a much more timely way. The bottom line here is that there has not been enough expenditure on asset management in order to develop those systems.
Lord Ashcombe: We read here in the briefing that the water companies were allocated £700 million in the 2024 pricing review. Is that sufficient? As a second question, is the problem country-wide or is it in certain parts of the country because of the geology?
Rob Lawson: It definitely varies, depending on geology, soil conditions, age of the infrastructure, population density, and so on. London is a classic case where there are huge challenges in reducing leakage. Sorry, I missed the start of your question.
Professor Jim Hall: I can come in on that. The Institution of Civil Engineers hosted a meeting with the Royal Academy of Engineering just a couple of weeks ago on this question of asset management. The question, “Has enough resource been allocated?” was posed, and the answer, at least from some of the water companies around the table, was no. Even in this AMP, they feel that they need to be spending more on maintenance than they are being allowed to.
Lord Ashcombe: That is what I suspected.
Rob Lawson: Yes. Sorry, that was the first part of your question. Forgive me. I would agree with what Professor Hall said.
Dr Chris Counsell: Going back to your earlier point, I was going to mention the water companies and the regulators working together. Up to now, there has been a tension between Ofwat regulating on customer bills, the Environment Agency regulating on behalf of the environment, and the water companies trying to satisfy both. With RAPID, there has been more joined-up thinking. The Cunliffe review has highlighted that Ofwat and the water part of the Environment Agency should be brought together, which will, one hopes, allow for a more joined-up policy position that the water companies can then target.
The key question that we need to define is about the trade-offs between everything. Customer bills, protecting the environment, and investment in asset maintenance—because it is expensive to maintain these assets—all have to be solved somehow. That accounting challenge has to be resolved.
Q67 Lord Rooker: Good morning. This is a fairly naive question that I am about to ask. The leakage from the system is bad. How much of that water is lost, or is it potentially recycled back into the system, depending on the geography? It sounds a bit naive, because the asset that we are talking about here is the one that we have put in the pipes, which has cost us money. Is the asset, being the water, completely lost or can any of it be retrieved into the system at all?
Rob Lawson: It can in certain geographies and geologies. Some work that I have been doing recently suggests that Birmingham is one place where there are returns from the leaks from the infrastructure into the groundwater, which is factored into the groundwater modelling that is done by the Environment Agency and others for assessing the environmental impacts of water resource activities. It does, but it is almost an undesired benefit, if you like, rather than something that is planned, designed or hoped for.
Q68 Earl Russell: I was really interested in what you were saying about trade-offs. Is responsibility and ownership adequately placed between government, regulators and industry for those trade-offs and deciding what policy flows from it?
Dr Chris Counsell: In my view, it is very difficult for water companies at the moment to act in that position. There are these regional planning groups, but, as I understand it, none of them are statutory. There needs to be some kind of mechanism to help support that management of trade-offs and that bigger picture. That then links to growth in datacentres and all of that. How do we do all that planning?
Earl Russell: There is a need for that big picture piece.
Dr Chris Counsell: That cannot really be left just to the water companies.
The Chair: It is an important question, and I hope that there will be an opportunity, if we have not asked any important questions, for you to make sure that the committee has that information.
Q69 Lord Rooker: My main question is about the emerging sources of demand and whether they are being fully accounted for. Who is responsible for providing the data on future demand? I have read the brief several times and I get concerned about how reliant we are on private sector water companies. One or two of you have mentioned commercial competence. We have to be clear. Are there good channels of communication between the sectors, which include private companies, and the Government?
We are told that the plans for water supply demands do not include certain aspects of technology, such as the datacentres that we have spent a lot of time on this morning. What other areas are not required to be put in the plans? A normal person would think that every area is part of the plans. We have a national water plan built up of different segments. How many areas are not required to be put into the plans?
Rob Lawson: It is a good question and it is a significant problem for the industry. As well as the datacentre piece, which we have probably talked about a lot, the other main area is energy. The energy sector works in a completely different way from the water sector, in that there is no requirement on any individual entity within the energy sector, whether that is the network operators or the energy providers, to produce long-term plans. Energy is demanded and met very much on a short-term market basis.
We have net zero, and scenarios and plans to meet that, but it is a fairly weak link between what those plans look like—there are lots of scenarios to achieve those outcomes—and what that water demand will be. As we touched on before, there is not that confidence within water company plans of where those demands will be placed. You can assume that a lot of the infrastructure for hydrogen will be in existing centres of energy production, where you have the power infrastructure as well as the water sources. CCS—carbon capture and storage—is going to be on the existing plants where that is an issue, but there is not a strong connection between water and energy in the sense that you are alluding to.
Professor Jim Hall: This is not a very difficult problem to solve. Of course, there are always going to be uncertainties. Technologies develop. We have talked about AI and datacentres, and indeed major changes in the energy sector, although hydrogen and CCS have been on the agenda for a long time now.
The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority—NISTA—is developing a spatial infrastructure planning tool that intends to bring these different aspects of infrastructure planning together. There are strategic spatial energy plans coming into existence, which will address some of what Rob has been talking about. It just takes a bit of focus and co-ordination, and we can come up with much better water demand estimates than we are using at the moment.
Lord Rooker: Is there evidence that the Government is taking all this seriously? I do not mean the Environment Agency; I mean central government.
Professor Jim Hall: NISTA is part of central government, and that is ongoing work.
Q70 Lord Duncan of Springbank: One of the challenges that you have alluded to is the cost of energy, which is considerably higher in the UK than in many of the other economies that we compete with. Is there a risk that we substantially seek to change our planning around water and so on, but the datacentres never come, so we make all this effort and incur this cost in trying to bring this about, but the purpose behind it just never materialises?
Rob Lawson: It is possible. It has happened before, with Kielder, which ended up as a white elephant, given the collapse in heavy industry in the 1970s. The whole water resources planning system has improved and changed beyond recognition since then. As we have suggested, there is now much more of an adaptive approach that can respond more quickly, but there is always that risk that we provide for something that does not materialise.
Professor Jim Hall: I am not sure whether we are thinking about the problem in the right way, in the sense that, as we have heard, all of this supply-side water investment is, for the most part, for supplies that are going to come on stream in the late 2030s and 2040s, whereas we are talking about a datacentre boom that is happening right now and over the next few years. We are talking more around whether there are immediate constraints on datacentre development, be that water, but also energy and specifically grid connections, rather than whether we have enough energy. Whether datacentres can get themselves connected into the grid within the next few years is the salient part of this question.
Lord Duncan of Springbank: The only reason that I am mentioning it is that, if the energy price is very high and datacentres are significant consumers of energy in that context, and they are making a global decision about what to do about this, then, as we seek to plan, a Government must assess how much money they are going to commit to the infrastructure for water in order to prime the pump. If those costs are just not stacking up, they might spend an awful lot of money to achieve a very resilient system that is never tested because the purpose behind it never materialises.
The Chair: Yes, indeed. We are nodding—excellent.
Q71 Baroness Whitaker: I would like to turn more widely to abstraction and what its role is, if you could delineate that, in managing drought. How does current legislation enable or limit flexibility in managing water resources? In spite of our excellent briefing, I do not have a very clear picture of who has to do what about abstraction and in what circumstances.
Professor Jim Hall: To begin with, the abstraction system, needless to say, has a long legacy of the way in which licences have been issued and what the conditions of those are. If we look ahead, the main trend that we can see, as we have mentioned already, is the need to reduce the amount of water that is being withdrawn from the environment. There is an ongoing process of licence reform taking place, which is driven by the environmental need to reduce abstractions.
A subpart to this question, which we began to get on to, is to do with the time variation in licensing. As we have already mentioned, there is probably a lot more that can be done in terms of fine-tuning licences so that water can be withdrawn when there is more available, and left when withdrawing it will be most harmful to the environment. For that to happen, first of all, there needs to be better data, so much better day-to-day monitoring of abstractions and some licence reforms that accompany that.
Given that we are focused on droughts here, it is also important to pay attention to the use of drought permits and orders, whereby water companies apply for the right to withdraw more water during droughts. That is a very important part of drought management and is underexplored in terms of what the implications of that are.
Dr Chris Counsell: Section 57 notices can be issued to spray irrigators, which prevent or reduce their abstractions during low-flow periods. That is a way of controlling that. By 2028 a lot of permanent licences are due to be cut, essentially, to meet environmental standards.
Baroness Whitaker: That is interesting. Who is largely doing this reform? Professor Hall mentioned that there is more to be done in licence administration. Who is responsible for that, and who is monitoring better data? I am not clear where responsibility lies exactly.
Professor Jim Hall: It lies with the Environment Agency.
Baroness Whitaker: Entirely? Does it have enough intellectual resource to do it?
Professor Jim Hall: As I have said, the data situation could be improved a lot. Part of that must be due to resource. Part of it, as we mentioned previously, is due to some of the confidentiality issues around abstractions.
Q72 Earl Russell: I just wanted to ask you about the role of the water companies in this and the conflict of interest, almost, that they have between delivering the public water supply on the one hand and protecting the environment on the other. In your view, is that fundamentally a problem for the water companies? Can they manage it? Is it something that needs further regulatory reform? If it is, do you have any recommendations around that?
Dr Chris Counsell: I think they can manage it, and there is a lot of work being done in that area right now by the water companies, through local-scale modelling. The challenge is how you fund the changes that result from that. It means that you need to find new sources of water and new ways of operating your system to replace the water that you will now not take in order to protect the environment. That funding mechanism is a challenge, because everyone is conscious about customer bills. That is where the challenge is. In terms of understanding the problem, there is a lot of work going on there, and that is happening.
Rob Lawson: Specifically from a drought perspective, the companies have to do a lot of work up front to demonstrate the likely environmental impact of any drought permit or drought order measures that take their abstraction outside of the normal licence limits, and then monitor the effect during the period that those measures are in force for, as well as the recovery of the environment afterwards. That is all within the drought planning legislation and drought planning process, which is fairly restrictive on what water companies can and cannot do. They also have to have enforced at least temporary use bans before they can move to those supply-side measures in drought.
Professor Jim Hall: The Cunliffe review proposed a much stronger river basin-based decision-making process that could navigate some of those trade-offs and join up across different functions in the water environment. It includes questions around droughts and water scarcity, water quality, pollution and floods, and join-up between the water companies, other abstractors and everything that is going on on the land. I am certainly in favour of that integrated catchment-based approach.
Q73 The Chair: May I ask you a question about priorities in decision-making when we are in drought? Mr Lawson, CIWEM expressed some concern about the transparency of the prioritisation decisions around water use during a drought period. How concerned are you? Why do we not know what the hierarchy or priority of use is?
Rob Lawson: That point came from a briefing paper that I probably had some hand in. The issue that I remember quite clearly in 2022 was that there were these Section 57 restraints on agricultural water use in East Anglia while there were no restrictions on Anglian Water’s customers. On a point of equity and fairness, I am not saying that one is better than the other, but there should be some greater clarity about why that is happening and how that is prioritised.
From a public point of view, it is very confusing to understand that, on the one side, there is an environmental and agricultural drought that is restricting an important economic activity and food production, while, as a customer, you are still able to fill a paddling pool or put your sprinkler on your lawn, et cetera. There is that disconnect there that, through more awareness and education, and better co-ordination of policy, could be addressed.
The Chair: Some stakeholders have raised the question of whether water companies are best placed to issue restrictions, or whether the Environment Agency, which has a duty to protect the environment, should have greater responsibility. Added to that is the complexity that we do not have a water regulator at the moment, given that Ofwat is no longer there. Do you know what is filling that gap at the moment? Who is responsible for water regulation today?
Professor Jim Hall: Right now, the current regulatory set-up exists and persists, so we are waiting for the White Paper.
The Chair: So Ofwat is in place with its current responsibilities and duties.
Professor Jim Hall: Yes.
Q74 Lord Lennie: What other legislative or practical challenges may limit drought responses and drought preparedness? You talked about regional planning groups becoming statutory and so on. Are there other things that you would suggest to us?
Rob Lawson: Yes, definitely. UK Water Industry Research did a study on the 2022 drought, which looked at the savings that were achieved through the demand-side measures, but also reviewed the code of practice that water companies signed up to in implementing drought measures. One of the key observations was that the existing drought legislation is out of date in terms of the digital economy and the digital world that we live in, and water companies can share information about drought situations in a completely different way than they were able to when that legislation was drafted.
In terms of the speed with which drought measures can be implemented by the water companies, someone mentioned earlier the idea of flash droughts, and 2022 is very much in that context, where those extremely high spikes in temperature caused a similarly high spike in demand. The companies found it very difficult to react quickly enough with the drought measures that were at their disposal, given the legislative context, to manage the demand and the communication with customers.
The other part of the legislation that seems to be a bit wanting is around the definitions of what temporary use bans or hosepipe bans apply to, whether it is commercial or domestic, sports grounds and pitches, gardens, and so forth. There was a bit of a mismatch there, when we dug into the legislation and sat down with some of the lawyers from water companies, about what this meant in terms of implementation. One of the recommendations in that report was for that legislation to be revisited.
Dr Chris Counsell: I would like to add something on the ability to respond to a severe drought. Some of the measures that we might want to put in, such as pressure cuts on the network or rota cuts, might be very difficult to implement in practice while protecting vulnerable customers. Although there may be some clear definitions around what should and should not be done at certain times, if we were in the midst of a severe drought, there would be quite some political pressure on maybe sacrificing the environment or sacrificing neighbouring areas to protect other areas. I do not think that we have fully explored how that would play out in practice.
Baroness Whitaker: Who should explore that?
Earl Russell: And how?
Dr Chris Counsell: Back in 2018, there was an exercise where there was a two-day workshop looking at, “What if there was a level 4 drought in the south-east? What would happen? How would people co-ordinate things? Are there enough tankers? Can you do all the things that you say you would do?” That was useful in exposing some of those issues.
Building on that, maybe led by the Environment Agency, with the help of the regional groups, we need to explore how we would really manage a severe and extreme drought, and do that thinking now before it happens, so that we know what choices we might have to make and what evidence we might need to underpin that.
Rob Lawson: It would be a civil emergency, and would involve Cabinet Office and those sorts of bodies to respond in that sort of situation, because you would be looking at some serious deficits in the availability of water, which we have not, as a country or as a public, really understood the magnitude or severity of. You would have to look at Cape Town and day zero for some sort of comparison.
Q75 Lord Jay of Ewelme: Britain is, of course, not alone in this problem of facing drought. When you look around the world, particularly at other European countries, are there lessons that you feel we can learn from what other countries are doing, faced with the same sorts of problems as we are?
Rob Lawson: Europe, yes, but also the rest of the world. An obvious comparator would be Australia, which had very significant drought in the early part of this century. That changed public perception, and the awareness of and the response to drought, in the sense that the message is always on. There is always some level of drought preparedness, even at this time of the year, in late November, where there would be signs and things on social media or on TV and radio saying, “Our resources are at this level. This is what you should be doing”.
To help with that whole awareness piece, it would be really helpful to have some kind of always-on messaging so that the public can understand that, as the Environment Agency said in October, there are still serious drought issues in parts of the south-east. We need above-average rainfall through this winter in order to recover the situation ready for next spring and summer. That always-on messaging would make a difference, as is seen in Australia and other places, such as California.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Who does that and how do they do it? Does it come across on Instagram or on Facebook? Where should people get these messages from so that they change their habits when they really need to rather than after the drought, as in Australia?
Rob Lawson: It should be through multiple channels. Everyone gets their news these days through different channels, so everything from the wraparound adverts or the links that you might see on TV. Weather forecasts have a pollen forecast. You could have a water resources situation update. For other people, it would be Instagram and TikTok, or goodness knows what.
In terms of who, that is a very good question. I would suggest that the water companies are probably not the best messenger for this, but then I am not sure that other agencies—the Environment Agency or Ofwat—have that mandate either, so it would need to be something different from what we have at the moment. An Ofwat project is being tendered for a £75 million water efficiency campaign over the next five years, which could be a vehicle for that kind of communication, and that would be led by commercial organisations that would deliver the message.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Are there any other views? It seems to me that you do not want something called “Ofwat” or “the Environment Agency”. You want a young, 25-year-old singer on Instagram or something. How do you do this? Do you have any thoughts?
Professor Jim Hall: First of all, around the world, there are some well-known places that manage water resources much more technologically and efficiently than happens in this country—Singapore, for example, in terms of wastewater reuse. Israel has been incredibly efficient also in relation to leakage. This industry has a lot to learn from around the world.
We need to be cautious in how much we expect from public attention in relation to droughts. The public have a lot of things on their mind, so the responsibility really sits with preparedness within the organisations that know most about these systems to be able to cope and to do the stress tests and the exercises. I agree that there should be a role for the Cabinet Office in that, so that this is really well thought through and played out in advance.
Dr Chris Counsell: There is a national drought group that convenes during periods such as this, and that could provide a vehicle for such a communication tool.
The Chair: Colleagues, we are at time. I know that there are still questions. It is not just you, Lord Mancroft. I have several others ahead of you in the queue. We are going to have to call time. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time. We have heard a lot about some of the uncertainties around measures of supply and demand. I wonder whether you can write to us to say how robust the shortfall of 5 billion litres per day by 2055 is. That would be of real interest to the committee.
I will just allow each of you, if you have anything further to say, time to have your say now. You do not have to. Nobody is indicating that they have anything further to say, so I call this public session of the committee to an end.
