Managing drought: CIWEM’s position

06 May 2025

Whilst many think of the UK as a wet group of nations, drought isn’t uncommon. How should it be managed? What lessons have been identified from recent droughts? And, what more needs to happen to build resilience? Alastair Chisholm and Rob Lawson explain, summarising CIWEM’s position statement on Managing Drought in the UK

The British psyche frames our climate as a largely cool, wet, temperate one. But the truth is our weather is very variable (that could be why we talk about it so much!). Dry periods can happen at any time of the year, in all parts of the country and droughts happen quite frequently, having occurred in recent times in 1995, 2003/4, 2006, 2011/2012, 2018 and 2022.

Drought affecting the resilience of public water supplies is often the most noticeable, but droughts can occur which predominantly affect nature (environmental drought) or irrigation for crops (agricultural drought).

The National Drought Group, made up of government, agencies, water companies and other water users monitor the national drought situation and provide high level communications on drought status and measures to be implemented. In addition, water companies are legally required to have a drought plan which sets out predetermined actions they will take when different ‘trigger levels’ of drought are met.

These actions are staged across four levels and seek to manage demand and increase what water can be taken from the environment, if it’s available. On the demand side this includes calls to use water more carefully (Level 1), through Temporary Use Bans (TUBs, aka hosepipe bans), bans on non-essential use by business and severe drought restrictions such as standpipe use, at times of extreme drought (not seen in the UK since 1976).

Increasing supplies requires companies to evaluate, monitor and mitigate the environmental impact of relaxed restrictions on water taken from the environment.

Changing conditions

Rainfall totals across much of the British Isles have been low since the start of the 2025. This has reduced the amount of recharge and refill possible in groundwater and reservoir resources over the 2024/25 winter, and left water resources below the levels companies would like to see at the start of the spring/summer seasons.

The rainfall accumulations for 2025 are shown below, with other notable drought years highlighted (non-drought years are plotted in grey). It shows that at present 2025 rainfall similar to levels last seen in drought events of the last 20 years. It suggests that sustained rainfall, such as that last seen in 2012, would be required to remove the threat of drought this year.

Graph credit: Artesia Consulting Ltd

Lessons from 2022 and recommendations

After the 2022 drought and in preparation for developing their latest water resources management plans and drought plans, several lessons were identified on how things might be managed better.

Asset performance under strain: Water companies need to better-understand how well their water treatment and supply assets cope during hot and dry conditions when demand is at its highest (and potentially whole new levels of demand).

Agile drought permitting: With the seeming increase in short and intense drought development timeframes, the drought permit application process proved too slow to enable water companies to respond quickly to rapidly changing conditions. TUBs that came into force in August were too late to save water effectively and in many places served little value with rain arriving later in the month and across autumn.

Scotland (which is exposed to drought risk because of its small water resource zones) has a two-week emergency application timeframe.

Clearer communication to customers: CCW identified that stronger messaging was needed over the urgency and reason for customers to use less water because of drought conditions, alongside better local clarity over exactly where restrictions were being put in place, and not.

This confusion came particularly in the south of England where some parts were affected by TUBs but others – equally hot and dry – were not (due to differences in the natural resilience of the resources, geographically – ground water sources tend to be impacted by rapid onset drought more slowly than surface reservoirs and rivers).

Maximising use of smart meter and communication campaign data: With smart water meters still forming the minority of water meters installed and drought communications campaigns intermittent, there is considerable scope to make better use of data around water use behaviours in drought alongside messaging effectiveness.

Proactive, agile drought response with greater public awareness of UK drought risk exposure: There has been a media and public perception of drought management measures as a failure of the management of public water supplies. However extreme drought measures, for example involving stand pipes for water supply, have not needed to be implemented for half a century and drought management measures are exactly that – a planned management response.

The current public discourse around the performance of water companies generally makes asking customers to limit their water use more challenging. However, it is important that water companies and their regulators are proactive in responding to imminent drought early and with stronger and clearer messaging. An approach similar to Scotland’s two-week drought permitting timeframe should be targeted in England and Wales.

This will be necessary even with more ambitious water resources development plans involving new reservoirs, transfers and leak reductions being driven forward over coming years given climate change and evolving weather patterns.

Balancing the needs of different water users: Water demand is growing and the exposure of different water users – for example agriculture, energy, emergency services, navigation and of course nature – to drought risk is also increasing as set out in recent analysis by the Climate Change Committee.

There is a need to plan better for the needs of these wider, non-public water supply sectors, both in terms of how water resources are managed under normal conditions and also how they respond to drought in a planned way. This will help to mitigate the impact of future drought on the wider economy and environment. Regional water resources groups are increasingly multi-stakeholder and may be an appropriate vehicle for driving this improvement.

2025 may yet prove to be a wet year overall, whilst rainfall so far this spring means it could be extremely dry. This uncertainty underlines the need for robust response plans to be in place and deployed in a timely manner.

Read CIWEM’s Drought Management in the UK position here.

Alastair Chisholm is director of policy at CIWEM
Rob Lawson is chair of CIWEM's Water Resources specialist panel