Six areas of England — parts of Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Somerset, East Sussex and West Sussex — have been declared in severe drought after the UK's hottest summer on record produced the driest April-to-September period in more than a century across the south-east and south-west. Ardingly reservoir, serving about 95,000 properties, sits at 19% capacity. Wimbleball, supplying customers across East Devon, North Devon, Somerset and West Dorset, is at 16%. The Environment Agency expects storage to be around 75% at this time of year. The structural picture is worse than a single bad season. Three water companies — South East Water, South West Water and Southern Water — have formally requested approval to impose non-essential use bans on businesses including golf clubs, private schools and commercial car washes. Environment Secretary Angela Eagle has not approved them. The gap between declaring a "level of drought not experienced for decades" and refusing to restrict commercial water use is the headline story. Water Minister Emma Hardy acknowledged that the environment would suffer in the continuing drought and instructed the Environment Agency to prioritise public supply over environmental rules where trade-offs are unavoidable. This is triage language: the system has no slack, so it is being asked to choose between tap water for households and river flows for ecosystems. The EA will now monitor reservoir and river levels daily rather than periodically, and will run heightened water quality monitoring because lower dilution levels raise sewage pollution risks. Smaller reservoirs are also under stress. Drift and Stithians, supplying 56,000 households in Cornwall, and the Tottiford and Venford group, serving 47,000 in Devon, are flagged as concerns. Businesses abstracting water face additional compliance checks. The cumulative picture is a system with no redundancy being stress-tested by a climate event that will recur with increasing frequency. Philip Duffy, Environment Agency chief executive, said water companies must "act now" and follow their drought plans. Eagle urged everyone to "use water wisely." The political posture is to push responsibility downward — to companies for planning, to consumers for behaviour — while withholding the regulatory lever (business use bans) that sits on Eagle's desk. Demand management is being asked to do the work that infrastructure investment and regulatory decisiveness should be sharing. The drought exposes a system that has been run for extraction, not resilience. Decades of private water company operation prioritised returns over infrastructure. Leakage rates remain high. New reservoir construction is essentially zero. When the climate event arrives — as predicted, on schedule — the response is daily monitoring and public appeals, not structural capacity. The next drought will find the same system in the same condition, minus whatever environmental degradation is locked in by this one.
