Water, water, every where...

As hosepipe bans come into force across regions of England and Wales questions are being raised as to why no major new reservoirs have been built in over thirty years.

I have skin in the game (forgive the Americanism) my father having worked on the construction of two in the late-fifties and early-sixties, the first in Somerset and the other in Yorkshire. Many of my childhood memories relate to being on-site with my dad, something that Health-and-Safety rules would presumably now prohibit. I have a photograph of myself in the driver's seat of a dumper truck on one site and vividly recall a vertiginous trip in a concrete hopper on a cable line over the emerging dam wall on the other, enough to have a site immediately shut down by the H&S Executive these days one imagines.

With a rising population, increasing water demands and climate change creating more regular droughts, something clearly has to be done, urgently. With an estimated shortfall of 6.5 million houses in the UK, dwarfing the government's commitment to building 1.5 million over the lifetime of this parliament, the situation is becoming critical. The tragedy is that, at the same time as exacerbating the risk of severe droughts, climate change also increasingly triggers flash floods, with all that excess water inundating existing homes (often built on flood plains) rather than being captured in reservoirs. 

But not only does it take time - and shed loads of money - to build dams, the competing needs of agriculture, housing and rail/road/power/industrial infrastructure make it increasingly difficult to achieve logistically. Spain has four times more of the larger reservoirs, serving a smaller population, than does the UK. Then there's the post-Brexit problem of a shortage of skilled and manual labour to build these huge civil engineering projects. One only has to look at the fiasco of HS2 to see that the solution is going to take years, if not decades, and cost a fortune.

The final question at PMQs in the House of Commons yesterday was asked by Pippa Heylings, Lib Dem MP for South Cambridgeshire, and related to delivery of a joint proposal by Cambridge Water and Anglian Water for a new Fens reservoir to serve this already water-stressed region. Her concern was that, even when delivered, the reservoir would only be adequate to provide a supply for existing homes and businesses, not the thousands more planned for her region.

The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who was in her place on the front bench at PMQs, almost visibly blenched at the prospect of yet another huge and pressing demand on her already-overstretched and rapidly-dwindling budget. Keir Starmer was right to lay the blame on fourteen years of Tory government neglect but the problem extends way back before 2010, with the last major reservoir, Carsington in Derbyshire, being delivered in 1992 when John Major was Tory PM.

Yesterday's PMQs was the last before the Summer Recess. The House returns on 1 September to sit for a fortnight before rising again for the party conference season until mid-October. I think we can safely say that this is yet another urgent issue that will be kicked into the long grass.

It's unlikely to be kicked into any deep water any time soon.