‘Thames Water just proved the system is broken – it’s the perfect sign’

Recent events have offered a snapshot of everything wrong with the way we manage water in the UK. Nearly three-quarters of England is now in drought. Millions of customers face restrictions on water use, and rivers are running perilously low. Wales, too, is facing drought conditions. And amid all this, we learned that Thames Water awarded its new finance chief, Steve Buck, a £1 million signing-on payment.

You could hardly invent a better symbol of a broken system. Thames Water is on the brink of financial collapse, carrying a debt pile of nearly £20 billion. Rivers across its region are drowning in sewage, and the company loses 571 million litres of water every day. Yet somehow, there is still £1million available for its top accountant.

Frontline staff are working around the clock to hold this failing company together, while customers are being asked to pay more and use less water. It is indefensible. Thames Water should be put into the Government’s Special Administration Regime and rebuilt to serve its customers and clean up our rivers, not reward failure.

But Thames Water is part of a much bigger failure. River Action’s latest investigation found 14,128 commercial abstraction licences across England and Wales, permitting for-profit businesses like golf courses and beverage manufacturers to abstract water from our rivers, lakes and aquifers. Collectively, these licences permit the abstraction of more than 43 trillion litres every year – enough to fill Lake Windermere more than 144 times.

Yet millions of households are being told not to water their gardens, wash their cars or fill paddling pools. Of course, we should use water responsibly during drought. But asking families to turn off their hosepipes cannot substitute for a national water strategy when water companies in England lose nearly three billion litres of treated drinking water through leaks every day.

Britain is sleepwalking into a water crisis of its own making, driven not by a lack of water but a chronic lack of political will. And water security isn’t just about how much water we take. It is also about protecting the rivers that sustain us from pollution.

More than one billion chickens are raised for meat and eggs in the UK each year, generating enormous quantities of manure. In the River Wye catchment, where there is one of the largest concentrations of chickens in the country, excess phosphorus from poultry manure has been identified as a major contributor to nutrient pollution and the algal blooms that have devastated the river.

For more than a year, River Action has been pushing Nando’s to publish the independent audit it says examined waste management in its chicken supply chain. Nando’s says the audit supports assurances that manure from its supplier in the Wye catchment is being responsibly managed. Fine. Then publish it.

Let the public, scientists, campaigners and regulators scrutinise the evidence and reach their own conclusions. We have written to Ed Sheeran, one of Nando’s famous “Black Card” holders and a supporter of nature recovery, asking him to encourage the company to publish the audit.

This is bigger than one restaurant chain. Nando’s sells around 30 million chickens a year. At that scale, responsibility cannot end at the factory farm. Major food companies have the power to demand high environmental standards throughout their supply chains.

That matters when the Government is considering expanding poultry production. More industrial-scale chicken farming without proper environmental safeguards risks placing greater pressure on our rivers. These crises cannot be treated separately.

Drought, abstraction, leaking pipes, sewage, agricultural pollution and the financial collapse of Thames Water are symptoms of the same failure: the UK has spent decades taking water and healthy rivers for granted.

We urgently need a national water security plan that puts essential public water supplies, sustainable food production and healthy rivers first.

Andy Burnham’s Government must tackle leakage, reform abstraction, invest in resilient infrastructure and make polluting industries responsible for their impact on our rivers.

Climate change means pressure on our water supplies will only intensify. Difficult decisions about who gets water and what we expect our rivers to endure are coming. We must prioritise essential public water supplies and food production.

But with increasing drought and water scarcity, should we really grant licences to take water from our rivers and aquifers simply to bottle it and sell it back to us? The choice is whether we plan now or stumble from drought to drought, asking households to use less while tolerating a system that wastes water, pollutes rivers and rewards failure.

The UK isn’t running out of water. We’re running out of excuses for failing to protect it.

Amy Fairman is River Action’s head of campaigns