RogerBW's Blog

In the Thames Water area, we are to have a "hosepipe ban" from 24 August. This strikes me as the wrong way to reduce water consumption.

Mostly that's because it's shot full of exemptions. For example, the rules say that I'm not allowed to wash my own car; but if I pay someone to do it for me, using the exact same water, that's just fine.

"But what about Bob the Small Car Wash guy, whose business would be shut down by this?" Well, the water company could pay him from their record profits, since their dilatory approach to maintaining reservoirs and mending pipes is the primary cause of the problem, wasting several litres of water per person per day. (We've had plenty of major leaks onto the main roads round here, taking days or weeks to be fixed – and presumably more onto side roads that we haven't seen.) And many small businesses will soon be shutting down anyway as their power bills become ten times what they were last year. More sensible instead simply to put a ban on vehicle washing at all, as an unnecessary use of large amounts of water, whether I do it directly, employ someone to do it for me, or go to a car wash.

And in general, hoses are really not the offender: rather, it's spraying water into the air rather than putting it where it's needed. (There are more exemptions for drip-type watering systems.) So ban sprays, all sprays, commercial or not, filled from a hose or just from the tap.

And of course we have the blanket religious exemption ("Filling or maintaining an ornamental fountain to operate water features with religious significance"). Your fountain that gives pleasure to hundreds of people can dry up, but someone else's private fountain of "religious significance" can waste as much water as it likes.

There's another trick: people with a blue badge for severe mobility problems are still allowed to use hoses for all the usual things, water a garden attached to a domestic dwelling, clean a private motor vehicle, and so on. It doesn't have to be their own.

The whole thing is a mess, in fact. Yes, there's been much less rainfall than usual. But while we scrimp and save and let our gardens die, and public parks turn brown, golf courses get a total exemption.