Households have been told to ration their water use because the South East is drier than “Sydney, Dallas, Marrakesh and Istanbul”.
Tim Mcmahon, the managing director of Southern Water, claimed that the company’s hands were being forced, adding that customers would have to use less water to avoid future bill rises.
“If you look at the south-east of England, it’s drier than Sydney, Istanbul, Dallas, Marrakesh,” Mr Mcmahon told the BBC. “We have got a very densely populated area and we need to start investing to cater for that.
“We need to reduce customers’ usage. Otherwise we will have to put other investments in place, which will not be good for our customers and might not be the best thing for the environment.”
Southern Water said the money from price hikes is needed to improve infrastructure because the majority of its water sources will have to change in the coming decades.
“We can’t keep extracting from our current sources,” Mr Mcmahon said. “Sixty per cent of them will be different in 20 years’ time. That’s where the investment is going.
“If you’re in Hampshire, water will be coming from Oxfordshire from the new reservoir we’re building with Thames Water, pumped all the way down to Hampshire.”
According to the Met Office, the driest parts of south-east England get less rainfall than Sydney and Istanbul, while American data suggests Dallas is also wetter than the south east.
The forecaster’s data suggests that the driest parts of the South East get about 20 inches of rain a year. It states that the average annual rainfall in Sydney is just over 48 inches a year, and Istanbul gets a little under 24 inches of rainfall every year. Marrakech, on the other hand, gets just 9 inches of rain a year.
An American government website states that the average annual rainfall in Dallas, Texas, is a little less than 35 inches a year.
Plans for a new reservoir at Havant Thicket, Hampshire, have been given the go-ahead
Southern Water and Portsmouth Water are building the Havant Thicket reservoir in Hampshire. This will be the UK’s first new reservoir in 30 years.
Southern Water said it would be able to store 8.7 billion litres of water, providing up to 111 million litres of water a day during a drought.
It also plans to take water from a potential reservoir near Abingdon in Oxfordshire which has proved particularly controversial, with thousands of people opposing the proposal.
The average household in the UK uses over 500 litres of water a day. A survey by Water UK found that 46 per cent of the British public thought their household used just 20 litres a day.