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Britain’s water companies are on the brink of constructing a new wave
of reservoirs. Schemes in Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Suffolk and Kent are well
advanced, and their designers are queuing up for the green light from planning
authorities. Yet the country’s water resources already exceed demand by
14 per cent. Much of the problem is that the surplus water is sitting in
reservoirs hundreds of miles from thirsty customers.

Quenching the thirst of the south could, to a large extent, be accomplished
by updating the corroding distribution network or forcing more responsible
use of present supplies. But the easiest option is to increase the reserves
of water, leaving customers to water their lawns and farms as they did before
the advent of annual hose-pipe bans.

High in the forested hills of Northumberland, within 5 kilometres of
the Scottish border, is Kielder reservoir, Britain’s biggest artificial
water store. When it was completed in 1980, it captured the waters of the
River Tyne and doubled the water available to northeast England. Since then,
however, water demand in the region has risen by just 8 per cent, and neither
the reservoir nor the expensive tunnels and pipes built to take its water
to the cities of the lower Tyne and Tees have ever supplied customers.

Kielder reservoir, now called Europe’s biggest boating lake, is large
enough to meet all the expected increase in water demand in southeast England
for the next 20 years. But unless Britain wants to devote several of its
largest power stations to driving the pumps, that won’t happen. Instead,
water companies in the south want to flood Home Counties farmland to fill
the taps and garden hoses of growth areas such as the Thames valley, Sussex
and east Kent, where the Channel Tunnel could trigger an economic boom.

The first project off the drawing board may be a 375-hectare reservoir
close to the River Stour at Broad Oak in Kent, among the fields north of
Canterbury. The scheme, like several others, is an old one. It was thrown
out in 1980 by Michael Heseltine in his first incarnation as Secretary of
State for the Environment, after a planning inspector called it unnecessarily
large and ‘damaging and intolerable to local communities’.

Now, as then, Southern Water and its partners in the project, are opposed
by the Council for the Protection of Rural England, which wants to see alternatives
to reservoirs developed as a matter of priority. These include the cleaning
up and distribution of water in local chalk hills that has been polluted
by seawater pouring into abandoned tunnels in the old Kent coalfield.

The next reservoir proposal comes from Thames Water, which wants to
flood about a thousand hectares of fields beside the main London to Bristol
railway line, close to Didcot power station. The reservoir would capture
water from the River Thames during high winter flows, which could then be
distributed in Oxfordshire and around the fast-growing town of Swindon,
where a further 10 000 homes are planned. Drilling rigs tested the local
geology this summer, in preparation for construction.

Three other projects loom. Anglian Water is investigating plans to build
a reservoir at Great Bradley in Suffolk to increase the capacity of its
existing system for diverting water south from Fenland rivers to Essex.
In Sussex, £30 million is to be spent enlarging a reservoir at Darwell
to water seaside towns such as Eastbourne.

And part of the Axe Valley in East Devon is to be flooded to meet local
demand, in spite of a large surplus of water – and an even larger loss to
leakages from supply pipes – in the southwest region as a whole.

The present chaos in water supply, with redundant northern reservoirs
and demand outstripping supply in the south, is a result of poor planning,
especially during the 1970s. During this time, the 10 large regional water
authorities were created in England and Wales from a hotchpotch of local
water supply and management organisations and sewage plant operators, to
handle what many regarded as a coming national water crisis.

Through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, water demand had risen by 35 per
cent a decade. It was expected to double again by the end of the century
and water planners explored ambitious schemes to meet demand, including
building barrages across estuaries such as the Wash and Morecambe Bay, and
bringing water from Wales to London. But just as the new authorities began
work, the water boom slackened. Demand rose by just 12 per cent in the 1970s
and by l0 per cent in the 1980s. Present industry estimates put the rise
at only 6 per cent for each of the next two decades. The demand predicted
at the beginning of the 1970s as likely by 1981 will not now be reached
until after the end of the century.

The new authorities spent the late 1970s and early 1980s slamming the
brakes on their expansion plans. Even so, they began the 1980s with 25 per
cent surplus capacity because several large projects came to fruition about
that time. Principal among them was the Kielder reservoir. Kielder was built
at the insistence of big companies in northeast England, such as British
Steel and ICI, which predicted big increases in demand. Instead, heavy industry
declined and their need for water has fallen fast since 1980. Likewise,
North West Water, whose pipes stretch from Liverpool to Carlisle, has seen
no rise in water demand for a decade and is planning for a decline in the
next 20 years.

Only small increases in demand are expected in the Midlands and Yorkshire.
Two-thirds of the growth, say the planners, will be concentrated in southeast
England, in the regions of Anglian, Southern and Thames.

This creates a serious problem for water planners. These are the regions
where the greatest proportion of rainfall is already diverted to taps –
more than 50 per cent in the Thames region – and where environmental damage
from water use is greatest.

For many decades, large areas of southeast England have drawn most of
their water not from rivers but from underground stores of water held in
the porous rocks of the sandstone, chalk and limestone hills. These natural
reservoirs, replenished by the winter rains, are also the source of the
region’s rivers, which begin as hill springs.

As the population of towns in the south has grown, pumping from underground
water has increased until the springs have begun to dry up and rivers such
as the Darent in Kent, the Misbourne in Buckinghamshire and the Ver in Hertfordshire
now frequently dry up at the end of the summer.

Drought has exacerbated the problem in the past three years. But the
fundamental problem is that water companies and other licensed abstractors
have increasingly drawn on underground reserves to supply the demand from
new housing, factories and golf courses, among others. The National Rivers
Authority has identified more than 40 rivers damaged by water ‘mining’ in
the hills of southeast England.

Christopher Binnie, author of a recent study of water resources by the
Institution of Civil Engineers, agrees that ‘most available ground water
has now been exploited’. The only way to revive the rivers, he says, is
to reduce abstractions. And that means building more reservoirs to capture
the rivers’ winter high flows for use in summer.

But dams cause their own environmental damage, upsetting the natural
flood cycle that sustains marshes, water meadows and mud flats all the way
to the sea. As Anglian Water admits in a recent review of water resources:
‘There is a fundamental conflict between the need to take more water out
of the rivers, and the need to sustain flows in them. Acceptable river flow
regimes will have to be established and perhaps maintained, and wetlands
protected against the lowering of ground waters by abstraction.’

Binnie believes that, for this reason, reservoirs will be built downstream,
near the sea. Lowland reservoirs consume more farmland, but Binnie sees
this as less of a problem than it once was, because reform of the European
Community’s Common Agricultural Policy will require large areas of farmland
to be taken out of production.

The Anglian region has two long-term proposals for increasing water
supply. One is to revive the 1960s proposal for the reservoir on the upper
reaches of the Suffolk Stour. This could supply east London and might be
essential before Michael Heseltine’s ambitious scheme to redevelop the east
Thames corridor can go ahead. Another is to take water from the River Trent.

Looming ever larger on the horizon is the greenhouse effect. Whether
or not the drought of the past three years in southern England is connected
to long-term change, it is a clear sign of what climate modellers believe
may be in store for the region. One prediction by the industry-run Water
Research Centre is that increased evaporation during longer, hotter summers
will reduce yields from existing reservoirs in the region by between 10
per cent and 15 per cent within 40 years.

But as well as reducing water supply, climate charge will also increase
demand for water. Gardeners will try to revive their parched lawns with
hoses and farmers will want to artificially irrigate fields that are now
watered by rain. Worldwide, two-thirds of water resources are used to irrigate
farmland, but in Britain the equable climate has kept the figure down to
1 per cent. The greenhouse effect could transform this situation.

Many water engineers are licking their lips at the prospect of growing
demand. They foresee a water crises developing in southeast England, perhaps
during the coming decade, that must inevitably lead to a reappraisal of
the grand schemes such as the estuary barrages, put on hold in the mid-1970s.

More reservoirs could be built in the southern Pennines, for instance,
to water the parched fields of East Anglia and the east Midlands. French
water could be brought to east Kent along a water main laid in the Channel
Tunnel. There could be desalination works and high reservoirs in the valleys
of mid-Wales to fill London taps.

One plan dropped two decades ago would take water out of the headwaters
of the River Wye, pour it into the River Severn, from where it would be
abstracted in Gloucestershire, pumped over the Cotswolds and poured into
the headwaters of the Thames.

But there is another way. The Council for the Protection of Rural England
is leading a call for a switch from ‘supply side’ water planning to controls
on demand and waste.

Leakage from water supply systems, says William Sheate of the CPRE,
is ‘a national scandal’. A decade ago, the National Water Council, distant
predecessor of the National Rivers Authority, put these ‘unaccounted water
losses’ at about 24 per cent of all the water put into the mains. A technical
committee concluded that this figure could realistically be cut to 14 per
cent.

Tom King, then Heseltine’s deputy at the Department of the Environment,
warned that all future planning applications for reservoirs would have to
be accompanied by evidence that leaks in the distribution system were being
found and plugged. A decade later, little progress has been made. Figures
published in share prospectuses last year, when the water authorities were
privatised, revealed a national average leakage rate of more than 25 per
cent.

Authorities with well-developed leak detection programmes have made
important strides. Despite a dilapidated network of Victorian water mains,
North West Water reduced losses from 38 per cent to 29 per cent and Wessex
from 27 per cent to 20 per cent. If such successes were repeated in other
areas, construction of new reservoirs could be put off for many years.

More savings could come from water metering. Water companies are likely
to install meters in every house in the country. They have to find a new
method of levying water charges following the abolition of the rates, the
local authority tax on which water rates are still based.

But the CPRE says that where water is in short supply, meters should
be installed now. Evidence from elsewhere in Europe, and a few British trials,
suggests that meters cut water demand by between 10 per cent and 15 per
cent. In addition, customers cut their water use most at times when demand
on supplies is greatest, by cutting out water-guzzling activities such as
spraying their gardens. Water meters would also encourage firms to make
and advertise water-efficient household appliances such as washing machines,
dishwashers and lavatory cisterns, which now use one gallon in every five
put into the water mains of Britain.

A decade ago Thames Water costed the idea of installing dual-flush valves
in every lavatory cistern in London. It concluded that the task would cost
no more than building a new reservoir and would save as much water as a
new reservoir could provide. The idea was not acted on, but a national strategy
of water conservation, leakage control and metering would almost certainly
reduce water demand by between 20 per cent and 30 per cent. It is an attractive
alternative to more reservoirs flooding the increasingly scarce green fields
of southeast England.