The press release issued by the Environment Agency on 23 June 2026.
Environment Agency Chief Executive Philip Duffy’s keynote address looking at how the devastating drought changed the way we manage and use water.
Good morning, everyone. There’s something fitting about discussing long-term resilience here at The Institution of Civil Engineers. In fact, during the 1976 drought, which we’re going to talk about today, the president of the ICE was Sir Norman Rowntree, who himself was a leading hydrologist.
Our subject today is the great drought itself and what we’ve learned from it. I’m going to spend a bit of time now talking about the events of 1976 – I’m going to talk about how since that time our preparedness has changed, but the risk of drought has changed. I’m going to make a case for what we in the Environment Agency think should be done across both infrastructure, social change, policy, and science to ensure that we’ve got access to clean and plentiful water in the years and decades ahead.
Now, it’s a very strange thing about our collective memory of our history that some years are more resonant than others. Some stand out in the memory, and others less so. And 1976 is very much one of those years that people recall the events of that year. They shape perceptions, they shape narratives, even today, and even for people like me who weren’t alive at the time, reading about it, many aspects of life in the UK in 1976 feel very familiar, but other aspects feel extraordinarily distant and alien, a real reminder that the past truly can be a foreign country.
1976 was in many ways a very difficult year for Britain. It was a time of very high inflation. There was significant industrial strife. It was in one sense the peak of the dreadful tragedies of the troubles, and of course there was persistent extreme weather throughout the year. But it was also a year where the recorded life satisfaction reached a post-war high, and there was significant social progress on issues like equality of pay between men and women, and civil rights.
There’s a sense from people’s recollections of the year, particularly those that were children at the time, that the summer of 1976 was sort of halcyon period – endless summer days, a Wimbledon tournament without any rain, an era of space hoppers, cricket tours, the whole world slowed down in the heat over that period.
But for those working in water the year had quite a different flavour, and we can see in the data just how drastic that year was. Starting with a very dry summer in 1975 followed by a very dry winter, 1976 saw record after record being broken in our climate. It was the driest year since the Second World War and had the longest heatwave, with 13 days of temperatures above 30 degrees centigrade recorded in West London, starting on the 22nd of June – so we’re almost 50 years past that today. Water stores, both in reservoirs and rivers, reached record low levels right the way across the country. In London, commentators noted that the grass wasn’t just brown, as it often is in the summer, it had gone white from the heat that had burnt the plants across the country. Farmers took photographs of their fields as cracked rock-hard pans of earth, and children playing in the streets found new ways of amusing themselves, rolling up melted tarmac using lolly sticks as if it was melted cheese.
As a consequence of all of that, many people experienced disruptions in their water supply, and some towns by late summer only had access to water from standpipes. The southwest was particularly hard hit by this. There was often very heavy-handed enforcement of water restrictions, and people complained it was turning neighbour upon neighbour. In Whitehall, nervous about the potential consequences of the drought, a first Minister for Drought was appointed. There were lots of public campaigns to encourage people to reduce consumption, and many of them, even in this pre-internet era, provoke the kind of predictable ridicule you would expect, ideas about putting bricks in your toilet system, or the famous injunction to consider bathing with a friend. If you watch interviews at the time, it’s really striking how many people compared the feel of the country at the time to the war – a war they had lived through. And they pointed out the need for society to come together to deal with this crisis, and the importance of acting with fairness and justice.
This drought wasn’t just a one-off event. It had very long-term consequences. It wasn’t just the £500 million that farmers lost as their crops died in the fields. It wasn’t just the 25% increase in wheat prices, or the astonishing plague of ladybirds that hit southern England. Long-term studies of the natural environment in England, published many decades later, showed that the drought actually changed the distribution of flora in southern England, with particularly severe impacts on heat-sensitive species like beech. And perhaps for the first time since the war, people woke up to the importance of water – its vulnerability, its importance, its scarcity, and that registered with the public.
So, I’d like to talk now about how we changed water policy since 1976 and where that’s left us over the last five decades. Now going back to 1976 – the way in which water was managed is very different to how it’s managed today. There was, in fact, a 1973 Water Act, and it took really important steps to create a regionalised system with integrated water management at the regional level. In fact, there were 10 new regional water authorities created, sweeping away the 27 previous water authorities who had been in existence since 1963. That is relevant because when the crisis hit, the water sector as a whole was already undergoing a huge amount of change. Despite that shift to regional planning, by 1976 it was still very early days. The new water authorities had a very fragmented system, a lot of very small-scale planning, a lot of smaller towns and market towns connected to very single sources of water, and the drought really shone a light on how big a problem that was.
In July 1976 the government made a statement to say that Leeds was going to face really severe problems that autumn, whereas Bradford, just a few miles away, would be unaffected, depicting the fact that systems were very fragmented and broken up between different catchments.
But I think the government did change its approach to drought in 1976. I think we can point out three really big long-term shifts that the drought led to.
The first one was that drought appeared in Whitehall rightly as a potentially disastrous catastrophic risk for the country, and a huge amount of effort, both then and ever since, has been put into structured, systematic planning to manage the impact of a future drought. Our doctrine is not to respond in the moment on the hoof, but to plan in advance and think through how we would respond, and we’ve got much more extensive evidence now, and planning about where we get water in the event of a drought, and how we prioritise its use. The law gradually caught up, and by the early 2000s drought plans and long-term water resource management plans became statutory requirements for all water companies. And then in 2010, following the Pitt Review for flooding, we had the Flood and Water Management Act, which created the EA as a category one civil contingency responder.
Nowadays, we manage drought as a national approach. We have a clear doctrine about who does what, how we prepare, and how we respond and recover. Core to that is the National Drought Group, which is a cross-sector senior level group that the Environment Agency chairs. It brings together all aspects of drought response in England – not just government, but regulators, our colleagues in the Met Office, water companies, and representatives from agriculture, the environment, and key sectors. It has helped us get to know each other and understand when a drought does hit, we are ready to act.
We have also got much stronger expectations of the water industry than we had at the time. Water companies must produce 25-year long-term water resource management plans, and these have driven much more integrated water networks and significant (but not complete) reductions in leakage. Through these plans, companies must do robust planning for expected growth in demand, future environmental needs, and the impacts of climate change, and we expect them to be resilient to a one in 500 drought event, like 1976.
Now, planning is very important, but in of itself it doesn’t create any more water. And there was significant progress in the 70s and 80s in expanding systems to store, manage, and transfer water.
A number of new reservoirs opened, notably Kielder in 1981, Rutland, and the Queen Mother Reservoir in West London (both of which were actually commissioned in 1976) but also a lot of very much smaller facilities, particularly strengthening resilience in places like the south west with the Roadford and Colliford schemes in Devon and Cornwall. This was complemented by a significant expansion of real-time monitoring of groundwater and river levels. Today, the EA collects more data than ever, more efficiently with new technology and improved processes on the state of our waters and groundwater, and there has been real progress on leakage. It was over 30% 30 years ago; it’s now below 20% – but there’s still more room to do. All those improvements have meant that despite having severe drought episodes since 1976, we’ve not had to resort using standpipes in England, although we have had to plan for doing so when things got very demanding.
That is a good track record, but sadly we can’t be complacent about the future, because the truth is that since 1976 we’ve begun to see the impact of human-induced climate change. For decades some of the features of 1976 – the very high temperatures, the long heatwaves – were considered wholly exceptional, but in many ways, looking at the weather we’ve had in recent years, they’ve become rather normal.
To give some examples, we’ve now burst through the 40-degree heat barrier with temperatures far exceeding those experienced in 1976. The summers of 2018, 2022 and 2025 were some of the hottest on record, and they put great stress on water supplies. And it isn’t just the severity of the heat and the drought that goes with it.
When rain finally does come, often in winter, it’s falling much more heavily over much shorter time periods, causing widespread surface flooding, which our systems are struggling to cope with. And we need to prepare for and communicate this new scenario we’re living in – this world in which there is either far too much rain or far too little and that oscillates very frequently. And one of the things that makes this even harder to explain to the public is that the changes we have seen so far are not climate change, but rather the first stages of climate change.
We will now need to make our country resilient in a very different set of circumstances to the 1970s, a shifting climate that is of immense speed.
And we’re not the same country as we were in 1976 in all sorts of ways. For a start, England’s population is 11 million higher than it was back then, and the projections show it will grow by further 8 million people by the mid 2050s. Now, meeting the needs of that growing population, whilst respecting the environment is a challenge I think that we can meet, but only if we take robust and comprehensive action. At the same time, since 1976 we’ve been helped by a decline in water use from water-intensive industries, but of course water use can go up or down, examples like farming and horticulture – practices change or new industrial demands arise.
Now, part of our response needs to be to look at demand and reduce it in very careful ways. It is an interesting observation to make that the recorded data on per capita consumption for water in the 1960s and 70s was actually lower than it is now, below 100 litres per person per day, compared to about 140 litres per person today. Lifestyles were different, whether it was access to private vehicles, watering of gardens, the use of domestic appliances, or even high-flow showers, people had different expectations.
So, we’ve got to address these complex challenges, accepting the society and culture we live in now, not the one we had back in 1976 and despite many efforts and widespread introduction of metering, we’ve yet to see significant reductions in per capita consumption.
Another aspect of public opinion is that compared to 1976, people’s aspirations for their water environment are much more rigorous. We have seen the wave of disgust caused by sewage spills, many of which are illegal, and we also see genuine concern around the country from communities about the health of their rivers. People do not want to see the rivers abstracted till they run dry, or thick with pollution. And the volume of water in those rivers matters just as much as the level of pollutants. Policy makers need to take into account these shifts in perspective when they consider their responses.
Taken altogether, this rising population and demand, these higher temperatures and the need to cut unsustainable extraction to support the natural environment, could leave us 5 billion litres of water a day short by 2050 – about a third of our current on-grid supply.
Hopefully you feel I’ve set out the scale of the challenge we face, but now I’d like to talk about what we need to do to meet it.
Firstly, we’ve got to build more infrastructure and build it faster and better. Now, the Environment Agency is celebrating its 30th birthday this year, but it is a matter of deep regret that during its 30 years of life, not a single new reservoir for public water supply has been completed. Now we do now have many schemes around the country in development and construction. Not only reservoirs, but water transfer schemes, desalination projects, and water recycling schemes, all of which need to be seriously considered and taken forward. As regulators, we and our colleagues at Ofwat and the Drinking Water Inspectorate have a joint team called Rapid, and they are working very hard to expedite delivery. And as I say, the industry must remain focused on its management of underground assets and cutting leakage.
Secondly, it is time to take managing consumption more seriously, and the government has set out a goal to get per capita consumption down to 110 litres per person per day by 2050. Later this month, there’ll be a major water efficiency campaign launched by our colleagues in Ofwat, and we know from research by Waterwise that most people do support effort to reduce water consumption to support our supplies and the environment. We need to make a very specific case of water that, unlike some of the other global challenges we face, for many communities reducing your per capita consumption does make a difference to the amount of water in your local community, and that there are steps we can take such as fitting a water butt for those lucky enough to have a garden and introducing more water-efficient appliances into your home. We at the Environment Agency are looking forward to action later from this year from the government that would improve the labelling of appliances for water efficiency.
Thirdly, we’ve got to start treating water as an integrated holistic system. A climate with very heavy winter rain followed by summer drought needs a different approach. The EA wants to make it easier for farmers to build on-farm reservoirs, with simpler permitting that will allow farmers to take more water in periods of high flow. We want to help rural communities develop what we call local resource options, which are networks allowing water users to collaborate locally. We want to create landscapes with our partners that can more easily absorb water and help groundwater recharge, for example by changing how we manage upland soils to absorb more water. We want to see urban areas and urban planning change to create areas that can attenuate and absorb the storm water temporarily during periods of sharp flooding. We’ve seen that successfully deployed in cities like Rotterdam, and it is central to the integrated water management plan in Manchester. Such measures would minimise the risk from summer storms and provide more reliable supplies of water to intensive urban water users. Water quality, flood risk, and drought are different aspects of similar problems. As I’m talking to you today, we’re awaiting the government’s detailed response on water regulatory reform. We in the Environment Agency are arguing for stronger integrated catchment planning. We think that looking across this water system, working with our partners, using our evidence and our knowledge of local environmental systems, could bring to bear a much more efficient and robust water planning system for the future.
Finally, I want to say a word about nature. There is emerging evidence that restoring rivers closer to their natural habitats, and improving riverine planting, can not only slow flood, and reduce some eutrophic pollutants, but can also help the biota survive extreme temperatures, with more and deep pooling at river margins. The recent changes made to integrate natural processes into flood management, and consider natural approaches to water quality, will in our view have an additional benefit to natural resilience.
Now, all of this work, these shifts we need to see, needs ongoing scientific input. We need to improve our modelling and hydrology as the climate warms. We need to understand better how groundwater moves through the system and how it’s recharged better. We think hard about behavioural science and how we launch effective drought responses. We’re playing our part at the EA by working with partners like the Alan Turing Institute to look at how AI and machine learning can improve water system modelling and decision making under uncertainty and having discussions with UK Water Industry Research about how to join up our efforts and maximise our impact.
September and October of 1976 were the wettest recorded since records began in 1727, and the great drought was brought to an end. And we need to move on to. So let’s leave the Chopper bikes, Steely Dan, Dennis Healey and all the events of that extraordinary summer, and look forward.
I think that is a positive place to start our deliberations, because we have an enormous opportunity in this room working together across different disciplines to learn from the past, but think about a better future. We can think about a future where economic growth and sustainability can be obtained through robust action, and we know a lot already about what needs to be done. So, our collective challenge today is to ensure we move fast enough with enough ambition and enough collaboration to make sure we have the impact we want to see on the water environment of the future. Thanks very much for coming.
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