Much of Colliford reservoir in Cornwall dried up after the relentlessly dry weather in 2022, with many people subject to a hosepipe ban for a year
Yorkshire Water helicoptered a temporary pipeline across a protected area so it could transfer water from one reservoir to another while Southern Water came close to reaching the legal limit it could abstract from a chalk stream. Megan Corton Scott, political campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “With leaky infrastructure wasting up to a trillion litres of water a year and no new reservoirs built for decades, climate change could bring severe water shortages to the UK and once again this Government is playing fast and loose with the future of the country.”
Yorkshire Water said its actions ensured their was no interruption to people’s water supply and that it spoke with Natural England about not disturbing the South Pennine Moors during the water transfer.