Surviving Drought (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)

Earl Russell Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Grand Committee

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a board member and director of The Water Retail Company. I thank our clerks and committee staff for their exemplary work, the many witnesses and the schools which worked alongside us. I also pay tribute to and thank my noble friend Lady Sheehan for her excellent leadership of the committee.

I welcome the Government’s response; 11 of our 17 recommendations were accepted in full and four in part. That is not something that the committee counts on. It matters—I will not set out all those recommendations because others have done so—and it is a constructive response, but as others have said—here is the central nub of the issue—what matters now is the pace of delivery, which must match the pace of the problem. I think we have said with one voice that acceptance is not implementation and that urgent action is now absolutely required on these matters.

The truth at the heart of the report is simple: our climate is changing faster than our policies can keep up with. As my noble friend Lady Sheehan said, we wrote much of this during last winter’s floods, yet here we are back in drought. Indeed, we need 120% of rainfall every month between now and April just to come out of drought. So floods and drought are two sides of the same coin.

The noble Lord, Lord Ashcombe, pointed out that the Met Office has shown us that we get 10% more rain now than we did in 1970. The difference is how it falls. We have the lumpier rain in the winter that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned; that runs off, and then we have this hydrological whiplash that our witnesses talked about when, in the summer, the heat bakes the soil and any rain we get simply does not soak in. Beyond that, our infrastructure is also built for a different climate. The steady rain of my childhood no longer exists. At two degrees of warming, droughts like that in 2010 will become 86% more frequent. At four degrees of warming, they will become 150% more likely. The increasing risk of multiyear events has the real potential to do absolute damage to our water security. I respond politely to the noble Lord, Lord Frost: I recognise his points, but he is asking us to report on a world that does not exist any more.

Our overall conclusions are not complex: we must capture the rain where and when it falls. It is the change required to get there that is complex. It starts, as others have said, with big infrastructure projects. We have not built new reservoirs in way too long. I welcome what the Government are doing on that, but these projects take a long time. The Government need to make progress and they must be honest about who pays.

Water infrastructure is also the very landscape itself—a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Our wetlands, peatlands and river restorations slow water flow in the winter and recharge it in the summer. Our dried peatlands also become carbon emitters, with underground fires when they are not kept moist. I absolutely agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich that we need more beavers—nature’s own engineers. We need to reduce licensing costs and put more into funding rangers, so that we can manage their reintroduction. I welcome the £300 million for natural flood management, but it falls short of a first line of defence. I want to see the Government go further.

Our report was absolutely clear about demand: 80% of the reduction in the next decade must come from the demand side. The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, is absolutely right to point out that 19% of treated water is lost to leaks; one-fifth of all the water we clean and pump is gone. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, pointed out that our consumption is still too high and is getting higher. Halving leakage by 2050 is a reaffirmed target but not a new one. I wonder whether the Minister would commit to having milestones on that journey.

Water companies are not delivering on the water efficiency measures. They are not the right vehicle, so I ask the Government to look at them. On Part G, we welcome that but when will the Government respond? Every home that we build to the old standard is one that we retrofit later at greater cost. We need grey water systems, rainwater harvesting—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, made—and smart meters in half of our properties by 2030, giving us near-instant leak detection. We also need better-designed taps. With one of the taps I have at home, it is almost impossible to control the flow of water. Would the Government consider mandatory labelling for fittings and improving fittings?

I turn to where the response falls short. The Government rejected statutory consultee status for water companies, pointing to the requirement to assist. I wonder whether that will really have an impact and how it will work in practice. We are not asking for a veto, but these pressures and tensions need to be better planned for and understood. The Government also rejected extending the remit for internal drainage boards. Again, that needs better consideration. As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, said, the water Bill offers an opportunity to change that. Will the Government take that up? That is my challenge.

On data, we have just 50 soil monitoring sites. I recognise the Government’s response but they must give us the detail. How many will there be, and when will that be done? The Environment Agency projects a deficit of 5 billion litres of water by 2055. Our evidence suggests that it is probably greater than that, and, as others have said, AI data centres and hydrogen production are outside of that and are projected to require another 767 million litres of water by 2050. The AI sector does not report its water use—a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. The Government need to require mandatory reporting for its water use. There need to be adequate guardrails for reporting and for the water it uses.

I welcome the new flood and drought resilience taskforce. Fifty bodies around the table is really good, but this kind of integrated working is what we really need. Will it have the powers required?

To conclude, as I have gone over time—I apologise, but I am trying to sum up this debate—I want to ask the Minister a final question. We have an El Niño coming. What preparations are the Government making for if the winter rains fail and we have another really hot summer? If that happened, we would be in a really bad situation.