Britons have been warned by a Thames Water executive not to flush their toilets after having a wee to conserve the country’s water supply.
The water firm’s strategy and regulatory affairs director Cathryn Ross has also implored people to trim down the length of their showers to save water.
Water companies regulator Ofwat has set companies targets to slash water consumption per person by a fifth by 2038, but most failed to meet those targets in 2021/22.
Former Ofwat chief executive Ms Ross said that levels of water use in the United Kingdom were unsustainable looking into the long term, with the average Briton using 142 litres per day, with Thames Water customers using 146 litres on average.
When she was asked if people should follow the advice of, ‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown flush it down, she replied ‘absolutely, yes’.
She added that the most important way to reduce water consumption on a day-to-day basis was short showers and not flushing the loo every time. The Times reported.
Ms Ross has also urged people to reduce hosepipe use during heatwaves. Her company didn’t introduce a ban until late August amid last year’s droughts.
A hosepipe that runs for ten minutes uses as much water as one person would use in an entire day.
Thames Water believes demand will increase across the regions they cover, London, Oxfordshire and Guildford, from 2.6 billion litres per day to 3.6 billion by 2050.
She said that Britain would also need more reservoirs and transfers of water from wetter parts of the country to match rising demand, saying that the UK desperately needs more water storage.
Thames Water wants to build a new reservoir in Oxfordshire, near Abingdon, where plans were rejected to build one there by the government in 2011.
Ms Ross told The Times they also needed to tackle the 24 per cent of water lost to leakages.
They want to get water from the River Thames near Teddington lock to fill reservoirs in east London, replacing it with treated water from Mogden sewage treatment works, but the plans have encountered local resistance.
But she has said the water is safe, it’s treated, it’s clean and that people need not be concerned. It’s expected that a decision on the scheme will be made in June.
The thing is people don’t want their bathrooms to smell like public toilets, and when the government allow, even encourages the arrival of millions of immigrants a year into the United Kingdom, and makes no additional provision for infrastructure, then it’s no wonder that there’s a water shortage. So, instead of blaming the problem on extreme water consumption, they should look closer to home for the actual cause of the shortages, inadequate management, inadequate maintenance and failure to provide adequate storage.
We have a Prime Minister that has a heated pool for God’s sake, yet we have to continually reduce our water while he and his family swim in a heated pool, one rule for the rich and another for the poor of this country.
But here’s the deal. I’ll cut my water by a fifth when Thames Water cuts my water bill by a fifth, until then…
And we really shouldn’t be going backwards in terms of quality of life, yet that’s what the United Kingdom is doing in every single metric, and if people don’t flush there will be stinky bathrooms across the country. Mine will be flushed every time because I’m paying for that water!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 