I couldn’t sell a bucket of water at Leather Lane Market. Unlike almost any other commodity, I could sell sand to builders, even soil to gardeners, but not water.
This is a real challenge for Water Companies. How do we get consumers to value something that has no intrinsic value? Yet every one of us needs water to drink and to run our homes.
Put the water into a plastic bottle and the relationship changes, there are plenty of stalls that will sell me a bottle of Evian for £2.
Pipe it into my home the relationship changes again. At a little over £1 per day I can get enough clean water to run my entire house, washing, showering, cooking, and drinking. Less than half the price of the Evian.
The water companies want us to use less water. They will provide inflatables to put in my toilet cistern, stickers saying 'turn off the tap', and a low use shower head.
But there isn’t a shortage of rain in most of the UK. At this time of year, over 100 cubic meters of water are flowing out of the Thames every second, about 13 million people live in the Thames catchment area – that’s 7.5 cubic meters each, per second, that’s a lot of fresh water.
We have a limited drinking water system, and hence the need for controlled consumption. If our water demands grow in line with our population growth, then we are going to need a much bigger system. Water engineering is on a huge scale; new reservoirs, treatment works and piping systems.
The costs of this are huge, and perhaps we need new funding mechanisms, metering, more reservoirs, fewer leaks?
The current debate around Water Companies regarding sewage is exactly the time to have these discussions, we have a once in a generation opportunity to change the relationship.
