Drought Conditions: England

Anna Dixon Excerpts

Friday 16th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is absolutely right to highlight the importance of farmers being able to store water on their land. We have been working closely with the NFU on that through the national drought group. But as I have said, as well as building the reservoirs, we need to focus on how to fill them up. DEFRA, the Environment Agency and the NFU are doing really interesting work on regional water resource groups and how we can strengthen water companies’ livestock resilience; supply outages have been a big concern. They are looking at one of the approaches being developed by South East Water: livestock registers, so that water companies are aware of where water is needed for livestock. They are also looking at flexible and dynamic abstraction. One thing the farmers said to me—I support them on this—is that the strict abstraction licences they have are based on dates rather than the amount of water in the environment. We are looking to trial a much more common-sense approach to abstraction in areas so that, if it suddenly chucks it down with rain, we would allow them to take more water

As well as dealing with the immediate situation with the extreme drought, my ambition is to look at how we ensure our reservoirs are as full as possible going into spring next year. I am very keen to work in partnership. There is always a balance between thinking about public health—which must come first—and the environment, and ensuring farmers have what they need. That is why that national drought group matters so much: it brings together all the important players and we try to work through that, but there is also that issue at the front of my mind.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

As the Minister acknowledged, Yorkshire is now in drought, and at least part of the blame must be with the water companies such as Yorkshire Water who have failed to prioritise any long-term investment over short-term financial interests. Does the Minister agree that we need to use the upcoming water Bill to strengthen and change the way our water companies are run, so that they are run in the interests of citizens and consumers instead of profit-making companies?

[Emma Hardy]

I agree with my hon. Friend that we absolutely need to be putting people first; the Prime Minister could not have been clearer when he talked about public control. She is also right to highlight the lack of resilience we have seen building up. Many water companies have areas that are like islands within them, where they are unable to move water around the network—they simply do not have the resilience required. That shows a complete failure of the regulatory system of the previous 14 years that allowed the situation to develop. One really important thing we are looking at in the water Bill is having resilience standards so that a company can move water from a part of its network where there is an excess to a part where there is not. You would think, Madam Deputy Speaker, that they would have developed that very basic thing by now.