Save water now or be caught short in future

The nation's toilets need changing, urgently, to cut water wastage and reduce the risk of shortages, a cross-party committee of MPs said yesterday.

In a report prompted by several severe droughts in the past seven years, the House of Commons Environment Committee said: "Reducing the volume of water being flushed down WCs is a priority."

That measure alone could cut household consumption by 10 per cent - "sufficient to mitigate any effects of climate change which are now predicted to occur."

The committee wants the standard flush on all new cisterns to be six litres, and incentives to encourage people to replace their current nine- or 13-litre cisterns. "We cannot afford to wait 50 years for old cisterns to wear out," says its report.

But for the water companies, the highest priority of all should be to reduce mains leakage; for some companies a quarter or more of water collected and treated escapes before it reaches the customers. The industry's regulator, Ofwat, should set a maximum limit for companies on how much can seep out of their pipe networks "as soon as possible", said the committee chairman Andrew Bennett.

The report is highly sceptical about increasing the number of water meters as a way of persuading customers to use water more wisely. The MPs visited low-income families on a London estate with meters.

"We saw families beset by worries about paying metered water charges," says their report. They accepted evidence that hygiene might be threatened and disease encouraged when poor, anxious people wash themselves and their clothes less, share baths and flush the toilet less frequently.

But the MPs also doubted whether metering would make affluent households which are heavy water users - those with big gardens and sprinklers, and swimming pools - use less.

Instead of meters, other ways of curbing households' steadily rising demand for water should be tried. Dishwashers and washing machines which minimise water use should be given "eco-labels".

t The sea water at 10 per cent of Britain's 472 designated bathing beaches still failed to meet the minimum, basic standards for sewage bacteria set by the European Union this summer, the Government said yesterday.

The directive came into force nearly 20 years ago but Britain was allowed to comply by the end of 1995; it still fails to. The Government said the water industry, now privatised in England and Wales, had spent pounds 2bn in recent years on coastal sewerage improvements which had pushed up the pass rate for beaches from below 70 per cent to 90 per cent.