England’s water supply is under growing strain and without action the risk of drought threatens vital systems, a House of Lords committee has warned.
The cross-party House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee’s report ‘Surviving drought: reclaim the rain’ has said the UK must store, manage and reuse rainwater much better to help prevent both drought and flooding.
It warned that England’s water supply was struggling due to a combination of climate change, population growth and public water supply leakage, and has called for action.
“Climate change is increasing the risk of drought through a combination of hotter summers and heavier winter rains making the capture and storage of rainwater increasingly important,” said Baroness [Shaista] Sheehan, chair of the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee.
“The experience of the 2025 drought sent a warning signal to the water and drought management system,” she added. “We have already had a dry start to this spring, so it is critical that action is taken now to prepare for serious drought conditions, particularly as we enter a reported El Niño year.”
Sheehan explained that public water demand could exceed supply by five billion litres every day if action was not taken now.
“As a result, serious thought, planning and investment must go into managing the environmental and economic threats that drought poses to England,” she said.
The committee laid out several recommendations to the government, including conducting a full environmental and economic assessment of drought to weight the cost of inaction against the value of resilience.
It said there was a need to balance supply and demand through driving a whole of society approach to drought, including through awareness raising campaigns, improving water efficiency standards in homes, and promoting water reuse and rainwater harvesting.
The report urged the improvement of drought resilience for sectors reliant on abstraction by prioritising regulatory changes to make the construction of local resource reservoirs easier and increasing the flexibility of abstraction licensing to support catchment-based water resource projects.
It also recommended publishing a prioritisation plan for emergency drought by no later than autumn 2026 and rolling out nature-based solutions more widely in urban and rural settings to strengthen drought planning and response to make it fit for the future.
“Water is the foundation of life itself. The government must act now to secure England’s most vital resource for the future and work with the public to ensure the taps don’t run dry,” said Sheehan.
“This government will not allow taps to run dry,” said a Defra spokesperson. ”We face growing pressures on our water supplies in England, increasing drought due to climate change, and water companies must go further and faster to fix leaks, but this government is taking decisive action with over £104 billion of private investment secured for our water system, we’re building 9 new reservoirs, and we’re working closely with the Environment Agency to ensure water companies learn lessons from last year’s drought so customers’ water supply continues in even the driest of weather.”
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