Water Resource Management in England: Transformation or Continued Lock-In?

Without significant action, England will not have enough water to meet demand by 2040. Climate change, in combination with the demands of a growing population, will lead to water shortages that represent what the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency has called an ‘existential threat’. To date, the response of policy makers and industry planners has been incremental, shaped to a large extent by the incentives embodied in the prevailing regulatory framework. Preventing the looming supply threat from materialising will require more concerted, bolder action across three broad fronts, sometimes referred to as the ‘holy trinity’ of water resource planning: improving infrastructure, reducing leakage, and reducing demand. A number of authoritative voices are calling for more transformational kinds of change, capable of breaking through the mechanisms that have tended to ‘lock-in’ unsustainable practices and allow for only an incremental approach to their reform. Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the topic, the National Infrastructure Commission’s 2018 report, Preparing for a Drier Future, called for new reservoirs and desalination plants, and better links between areas to create a genuinely national water network. But the Commission also suggests that new infrastructure can only provide around a third of the solution, requiring more ambitious efforts to halve rates of leakage and reduce per capita consumption. The on-going process of abstraction licensing reform also presents important opportunities to ‘unlock’ engrained, unsustainable practices. In place since 1960s, the system has allowed most abstractors to receive a licence to take a fixed volume of water, regardless of availability. But although hundreds of licences have been either revoked for non-use or reduced in the quantity permitted, the new approach is more incremental than some of the proposed alternatives, and there are doubts as to its ultimate effectiveness in implementation. This paper explores some possible reasons why established practices have proved so hard to challenge, what bolder reform would require, and the prospects for more transformational change in future.