Thames Water Urges 15 Million to Stop Using Hosepipes
Thames Water has urged its 15 million customers across London and the Thames Valley to stop using hosepipes, after demand jumped by around half in the heat — an advisory that stops short of a formal ban but signals how close the system is to one. It follows formal hosepipe bans already in force for millions of households in the East of England, Kent and Hampshire, and leaves much of southern England under some form of water restriction after the second-driest spring on record.
An advisory rather than a ban is a calibrated step: it lets the company lean on public goodwill to cut peak demand without the enforcement and reputational weight of a formal restriction, buying time as reservoirs draw down. But that Britain’s largest water company, serving the capital, is now asking 15 million people to conserve is a measure of the strain a dry winter and a hot summer have put on supply. Thames Water carries its own baggage — heavy debts, sewage fines and a near-collapse that has drawn in regulators and ministers — so its appeal lands amid a wider argument about decades of under-investment in reservoirs and leaking pipes. Watch whether the advisory hardens into a formal ban, whether other suppliers follow, and how the incoming government handles a water sector already in crisis.