Conclusion 8

Around 20% of the public water supply, equivalent to 3 billion litres, is lost to leakage every day. This is down from a high of over 4.5 billion litres a day in the early 1990s but higher now than it was 20 years ago.11 Following over a decade of complacency and inaction, the Department urged water companies in 2016 to make tackling leakage a much higher priority but still there has been little progress. Ofwat acknowledged that, until 2016, there was not enough attention on leakage and that “everybody took their eye off the ball”.12 We challenged the Department to tell us why it was not putting more pressure on the water companies to tackle this issue. It acknowledged that performance on reducing leakage had been flat over recent years but said there had been a huge emphasis on shifting that over the next five-year period. The Department described it as an absolute priority and a very significant part of the current set of water company plans and said that many of the water companies have committed to a 50% reduction in leakage by 2050.13