We are on a hosepipe ban. They want to add 456,000 homes.
A temporary use ban has been in force across the whole Anglian Water region since 1.01am on Saturday 11 July 2026. It covers more than five million of us, and it came a day after Cambridge Water announced the same. We cannot water a garden with a hosepipe. We cannot fill a paddling pool. Anglian's restrictions reach as far as dripper hoses and automatic irrigation.
Anglian Water says rivers across the region are at notably or exceptionally low levels and reservoirs lower than expected for the time of year, following the second driest spring on record in the East of England.
This is the water we have. The government's formula wants another 45,596 homes a year on top of it.
Not one of them arrives with any water
Here is what a new estate does to the supply. It connects to the existing network and draws from the existing sources — the same chalk aquifers, the same rivers, the same reservoirs already too low to let us use a hosepipe in July. It does not create a drop of new water. It divides the water we have into more shares.
Two hundred houses cannot build a reservoir. Not because the developer is unwilling, but because the system forbids it: a planning obligation has to be directly related to the development that pays for it. Nobody can lawfully require a village estate to fund a strategic water resource forty miles away, so nobody does. The houses get built. The water does not.
Do that four hundred times across four hundred villages and you have the demand of a city with the water infrastructure of a parish.
What it actually takes to build a reservoir
England has not completed a new reservoir in more than thirty years. Two are now going ahead — one in the Fens, one in Lincolnshire — and they are happening because the government intervened directly, awarding them "nationally significant" status and pulling the planning process from local level up to national government.
That is the whole lesson. The Fens Reservoir, between Chatteris and March, will supply 87 million litres a day to 250,000 homes and is set for completion in 2036. The Lincolnshire Reservoir, south of Sleaford, will provide up to 166 million litres a day for up to 500,000 homes, aimed at 2040.
Reservoirs get built when someone with national authority decides a place is important enough to build one for. They have never once been built because a district council approved another hundred and fifty houses.
The arithmetic nobody wants to do
At the formula's rate, the East of England adds around 456,000 homes between now and the year the Fens Reservoir opens.
The reservoir serves 250,000.
We are building homes almost twice as fast as we are building the water to supply them — and the gap is not an accident. It is the mechanical result of putting the homes where nothing can be required of them.
What we want
Not fewer homes. Homes in places big enough that the water has to be built first. Every hundred and fifty houses on the edge of a village is a hundred and fifty houses that will never trigger a reservoir. Development at a scale that can be made to build one is the only kind that ever has.
Currency note: this page rests on a live hosepipe ban and on reservoir programmes with moving dates. Check the restriction is still in force before quoting it on leaflets.
Questions
- Isn't this just an argument against building houses?
- No. England needs the homes. We are arguing about where, because where decides whether the water gets built. A development large enough to be designated nationally significant can be required to fund strategic water infrastructure. A village extension cannot — and every one we approve makes the shortage slightly worse while contributing nothing to solving it.
- So where would you put them instead?
- Somewhere large enough that the infrastructure is part of the deal. The two reservoirs now going ahead prove the principle: build at a scale that commands national attention and the water gets built alongside. Scatter the same number of homes across four hundred villages and it never does.
- Aren't the new reservoirs going to fix this?
- They help enormously, and we support them. But the Fens Reservoir opens in 2036 and serves 250,000 homes, while the region is on track to add roughly 456,000 in the same period. One reservoir every thirty years does not keep pace with 45,596 homes a year.
- Couldn't developers just be made to pay for water infrastructure?
- Not under the current rules, and this is the heart of it. Planning obligations must be directly related to the development paying them. A strategic reservoir serving a quarter of a million homes cannot be pinned to any one estate, so it is pinned to none of them. The mechanism does not exist at village scale. It does exist at new-settlement scale.
- Isn't the hosepipe ban just the weather?
- The weather triggered it. The vulnerability was built. Anglian Water points to the second driest spring on record combined with record temperatures and exceptionally high demand — and demand is the part policy controls. We have added households for thirty years without adding sources.
- What about leaks and water efficiency?
- Both matter and both should be pushed hard. Neither creates new supply, and neither scales with the number of homes we are being asked to absorb. Fixing leaks is necessary. It is not a reservoir.
- Where do your figures come from?
- Housing figures are the government's standard method for local housing need, December 2024 NPPF, May 2026 vintage. Reservoir figures are from the government's own announcement and Anglian Water. Restriction details are from Anglian Water's live notice. If we have got something wrong, email corrections@stopurbansprawl.uk and we will fix it and say what changed.
What's planned near us?
Find the district page for where we live.
All infrastructure topics · The numbers · Corrections
It's clear we don't have enough infrastructure already. So how can the government expect to build another 1,367,880 homes?
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