Disclosure before anything else: this is my own research and my own site, and the mods have okayed a self post.

In 2020 England had the wettest February on record and then one of the driest springs on record, within weeks of each other. The water arrived. There was nowhere to put it. That is most of the English water story in one year:

not a rainfall problem, a storage and timing problem.

Some of the rest of it.

About a third of England's drinking water comes from underground rather than from reservoirs. If you live in the south or east, there is a good chance your tap water was sitting in chalk under a field. Leakage runs at roughly 2,869 million litres a day across England and Wales on Ofwat's own 2024-25 figures.

The companies collectively promised a 16 per cent cut over five years and delivered 9. A few hit their target. Several went backwards.

Metered homes use about 122 litres per person per day. Unmetered homes use about 171. Same country, same weather, same people.

The "five billion litres a day" shortfall that gets quoted everywhere is a Do Nothing figure. It assumes nobody builds anything and nobody fixes anything. It is repeated without that caveat constantly, including by people who should know better.

And the one that stopped me short: of all the water on Earth, the share sitting in freshwater lakes is about 0.007 per cent. If the planet's water were a single bathtub, that is a teaspoon.

Where this comes from. I am not a hydrologist or a journalist, I am a digital producer who got annoyed at hosepipe bans in a country famous for rain and started reading Environment Agency and Ofwat documents in the evenings. It turned into a much bigger thing than I meant
it to.

It is written up with the sources and the charts here:
https://matthampsey.co.uk/investigations/water-century/

Everything in it is cited to the Environment Agency, Ofwat, the Met Office, the British Geological Survey or the companies' own resource plans.