Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?

England's South-East is permanently threatened by water shortages. The UK has one of Europe's highest levels of household water consumption. In spite of this, the UK government has ruled out compulsory water metering (even in locations, with a long and growing history of water shortages). Since their creation, England's privatised Water Companies have generally failed to invest in water security. The UK's last reservoir was completed in 1992, shortly after but planned before, privatisation. Three new reservoirs are currently planned but none of these are in the Thames region. Thames Water (serving London), as the name suggests, gets much of its water from the river Thames. Like the rest of England's water companies, Thames Water 'self-regulates', when it takes water from rivers and aquifers. This means it can take as much water as it likes and doesn't have to report the amount extracted. What would happen to London's water, if the Thames ran dry? George Monbiot details a wholly inappropriate engineering scheme, planned by Thames Water (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/23/h20-scheme-water-severn-thames-hs2-england). The West of England and Wales, receive more rainfall than the South-East. Thames Water consequently want to build a 90 km pipeline, from the River Severn in Gloucestershire to the Thames. When their local river levels become low, Thames Water would pump 500m litres per day from the Severn. Interestingly, this is only a little less than the circa 635m litres Thames Water loses in leakage each day. Making 500m litres of water available to pump daily would, however, require diverting current supplies to North-West England (Liverpool and Manchester), Worcester and Birmingham, into the Severn. This would clearly be robbing Peter to pay Paul. And that's without even mentioning the dire environmental consequences to rivers, wetlands, fish stocks etc over an extensive UK area. Rather than focussing on rewarding its shareholders and CEO, Thames Water should be using its money to put things right 'in its own backyard'. Going some way to fixing the highest leakage in England and building local means of conserving water would be sensible starts.