Morality
At the same time, the UK is failing to tackle another threat to its water: pollution. A recent assessment found the country is falling behind international efforts to combat microplastics.
While the EU and US are introducing enforceable limits on microplastics in water and wastewater, the UK continues to regulate only microbeads in cosmetics – a tiny fraction of the problem.
Scientists are calling for a national roadmap with measurable targets, product design standards, and interventions in high-emission sectors like textiles, agriculture and sewage sludge disposal.
This makes clear that while individual households are being asked to conserve water, the real pollutants – fragmented plastics and industrial contaminants streaming through rivers and fields – are being overlooked.
It is yet another example of a deeper shift: the transfer of responsibility. What was once a collective duty of governments and utilities to ensure safe, sufficient water has been reframed as a matter of personal morality and consumer behaviour.
Protect
By commodifying water, the burden of managing scarcity is passed down to individuals, absolving the very systems that created the crisis.
And this governance failure becomes even more fragile in the face of a changing climate.
Of course, the climate is changing. Hotter, drier summers and erratic rainfall are amplifying pressures on water systems everywhere.
But climate breakdown alone does not explain why a spell of dry weather so easily becomes a crisis. What turns a drought into a systemic failure is how societies choose to manage, or mismanage, the water they have.
The UK is not an arid country. It receives more than enough annual rainfall to meet its needs. Yet without well-maintained infrastructure, healthy ecosystems to store and filter water, and strong regulation to protect rivers and aquifers, this abundance is squandered.
Shifted
Climate change exposes these weaknesses, but it did not create them.
The same forces that have left pipes leaking, wetlands drained and regulators toothless are now colliding with a more volatile climate.
Together, they produce a fragile system where even modest environmental stress triggers emergency measures. And while households are told to save water, industrial users and polluters continue largely unchecked.
What is unfolding in the UK is both a political and cultural crisis. Water has been recast as a commodity, stripped of its social and ecological meaning and managed primarily as an economic asset.
This logic of commodification shapes not only infrastructure and regulation, but also how scarcity is understood. When water becomes just another commodity, the burden of shortage is shifted onto individuals rather than the systems that govern it.
Inheritance
In Cape Town, this dynamic was laid bare during the 2018 ‘Day Zero’ crisis. For decades, the city’s poorest residents in informal settlements had lived without reliable access to piped water, and their daily struggles went largely unnoticed.
It was only when drought restrictions began to affect the city’s affluent neighbourhoods, areas accustomed to lush gardens, swimming pools and unlimited supply, that water scarcity was suddenly framed as a collective emergency.
Wealthy households were told to ration themselves to 50 litres a day, and for the first time the privileged experienced what the poor had endured all along.
The crisis revealed what happens when the culture of water governance is dominated by market logic: access becomes normalised for some, precarious for others, and systemic inequality is ignored until it touches the powerful.
The same cultural shift has taken place in England and Wales. By privatising water, Thatcher’s government embedded the idea that water should serve the market first and society second. That cultural inheritance has proved harder to reverse than any single drought or policy failure.
Reinvested
Hosepipe bans may ease immediate pressure, but they cannot repair decades of neglect or undo the cultural shift that turned water into a commodity.
As long as water is governed primarily for profit rather than as a shared lifeblood, the system will remain fragile, vulnerable to both climate extremes and corporate extraction.
There are other paths. Across Europe and beyond, cities and regions are reclaiming water as a public trust.
Paris ended private water concessions in 2010 and reinvested the savings in maintaining its network. Berlin, Naples and dozens of municipalities across Spain have followed similar routes.
Failures
Scotland kept water in public hands and avoided the governance failures seen in England and Wales. These examples show that democratic, non-market models of water management are not only possible but already working.
For the UK, this would mean moving beyond the illusion that individual restraint can solve a systemic crisis.
It would mean confronting the political and economic choices that have made the system so vulnerable: reversing decades of privatisation, strengthening regulation, restoring ecosystems and treating water not as a commodity to be sold but as a common good to be protected.
Until that happens, the same story will repeat itself: a dry summer becomes a crisis, the public is told to ‘do their bit,’ and the deeper failures of governance remain untouched.
This Author
Filippo Menga is an associate professor of geography at the University of Bergamo, visiting research fellow at the University of Reading and editor-in-chief of the journal Political Geography. His latest book isThirst: The Global Quest to Solve the Water Crisis (Verso, 2025).
