The 2027-32 drought plans, which are under consultation, detail what will happen in different scenarios, with the most extreme actions ranging from standpipes in the street to rota cuts, where water is limited to a few hours each day.<\/p>\n
Alongside these publicly available plans, water companies are required to produce separate emergency drought plans.<\/p>\n
A water industry source said these plans were not published to avoid alarming the public. The government said the plans were not published for security reasons.<\/p>\n
Alastair Chisholm, the water, policy, regulation and governance lead at the consultancy firm Arup, said that in the \u201cnew normal\u201d of the climate crisis causing droughts to become more frequent and more extreme, there would probably be situations where \u201csome quite difficult decisions need to be taken with some quite significant imposition\u2019s on people\u2019s lifestyles\u201d.<\/p>\n
He pointed to Day Zero<\/a> in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018, when millions of households faced drastic water shortages after the worst drought to hit the city in almost a century.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople do genuinely start to be scared that they\u2019re not going to be able to get water to drink, and that has got all manner of sort of social connotations which is going to need to be very carefully managed,\u201d Chisholm said.<\/p>\n Prof Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said it made sense not to publish these plans because drought could lead to widespread impacts on certain critical industries. For example, recent drought and extreme heat in Europe forced several nuclear power plants to shut down.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIf you start to see significant shortages of water that impact major industries then these are the kind of things you want to keep confidential because that could have widespread effects on the security of the country,\u201d Bentley said.<\/p>\n In some areas of England, the impact of water shortages is already being felt. Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk have all seen housing and business development delayed due to water supply availability and ageing or inadequate water infrastructure.<\/p>\n Water shortages are also affecting food security, with global food prices at a three-year high<\/a> as heatwaves, drought and war push up the cost of crops.<\/p>\n With water increasingly becoming a scarce commodity and as demand for water increases due to the rapid growth of water-hungry industries such as datacentres, the trade body Water UK recently told the Guardian<\/a> it had asked the government to publish a drought hierarchy to set out which sectors would be prioritised in times of water shortages, but that ministers had yet to do so.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout this there will be a trade-off across society,\u201d said Jon Chappell, Water UK\u2019s deputy director.<\/p>\n Ollie Hayes, the head of big tech and campaigns at the campaign group Global Action Plan, said that amid increasing concern that datacentres could be prioritised over other sectors for water, it was irresponsible for the government to keep its emergency drought plans from the public.<\/p>\n
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