Yorkshire Water announced a hosepipe ban on water usage today, as water levels continued to drop around the region. The ban will come into force on 11 July and restricts the use of hosepipes for a variety of activities. However blue badge holders, those on Yorkshire Water’s priority services register or WaterSure tariff for medical reasons, are excluded from the restrictions.
This announcement comes as reservoirs around Yorkshire continue their dramatic decline. Data released by Yorkshire Water, indicate that levels have dropped further from the 63% recorded in May 2025 to 55.8% in June 2025. Reservoirs are close to half full with the summer months still ahead.
Yorkshire drought
On 12 June, the Environment Agency announced that the Yorkshire region had entered drought status, following the driest spring in 132 years.
Yorkshire Water’s director of water, Dave Kaye, said: “We need to take action now to help conserve water and protect Yorkshire’s environment. That means from Friday this week, people across Yorkshire will need to stop using their hosepipes to water their gardens, wash their cars or for any other activities.
“Introducing these restrictions is not a decision we have taken lightly, and we’ve been doing everything we can to avoid having to put them in place.
“Our region experienced an extremely dry spring, which resulted in the region entering drought status in June. Usually, spring is a time when our groundwater sources and reservoirs continue to be topped-up by changeable weather, but this has not been the case in 2025, with our reservoir stocks falling since the last week of January.”
| Month | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| January | 93% | 98% | 98% |
| February | 91% | 98% | 97% |
| March | 97% | 98% | 88% |
| April | 97% | 92% | 76% |
| May | 88% | 94% | 63% |
| June | 76% | 88% | 56% |
| July | 78% | 68% | |
| August | 83% | 68% | |
| September | 80% | 83% | |
| October | 97% | 83% | |
| November | 96% | 83% | |
| December | 97% | 92% |
Data above from Yorkshire Water’s water situation report, with the June data added in.
Where has all the water gone?
In the year 2023–2024, Yorkshire Water were in the top four of worst performers in losing water through leaks, being responsible for an average leakage of 260 million litres of water a day.
It is also worth remembering that Yorkshire Water has a licence to abstract water from reservoirs, groundwater and rivers for a range of purposes, such as domestic use, agriculture, selling to multinational companies, or supplying water for industrial use. One of these licences, which is current until 2027, allows Yorkshire Water to abstract up to 1,000 cubic metres per hour from Ponden reservoir. Another licence for the River Wharfe at Arthington in Leeds, allows for a maximum abstraction of 3,375 cubic metres per hour, or 78,000 cubic metres per day.
One cubic metre is approximately 220 gallons of water. Yorkshire Water has therefore been granted the authority to remove up to 742,500 gallons of water per hour, or a whopping 17,160,000 gallons of water a day if necessary – from just one river in Yorkshire. It’s worth noting of course, that this is the maximum limit for these specific abstraction licences, but this information hopefully gives a sense of the amount of water that can be removed by Yorkshire Water alone.
Both Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency were asked to confirm how many active abstraction licences there were in Yorkshire. Yorkshire Water couldn’t tell me, but offered to put in an environmental information regulation request to detail who was taking the water out of Yorkshire waterways. On the other hand, the Environment Agency told Yorkshire Bylines that:
“As of today (20/06/2025), there are 1,792 active water abstraction licences in Yorkshire. Of these, 88 are transfer licences, which allow water to be moved from one source to another without being used in between.”
The agency broke this down further and said that 1,113 licences that permit abstraction were from groundwater sources and 679 licences permit abstraction from surface water sources.
At present (20/06/25), 185 licences in Yorkshire include hands-off flow conditions, where licence holders have been given warnings that their abstraction could be restricted.
The ominous warning from Yorkshire Water is that the company will have to abstract more water from rivers to compensate:
“Having restrictions in place also allows us to apply for drought permits from the Environment Agency, which means we can abstract more water from our rivers and reduce compensation flows out of our reservoirs so that we can continue to provide the water our customers rely on us for.”
What is Yorkshire Water doing?
Yorkshire Water had hoped that recent rainfall would have increased reservoir levels and taken the pressure off the long decline in reservoir stocks since January. Below-average rainfall across the whole of Yorkshire affected reservoirs, with catchments experiencing between 13% and 33% of the long-term average. Some rivers were also classified as being ‘below critical level’.
The ‘praying for rain’ strategy seems not to be working.
Yorkshire Water had already urged customers to use water more wisely to reduce water usage in May, but with meteorological summer already started, more steps and strategies may be needed to balance, or limit, the stress on water resources, before drought contingency planning steps are triggered. With warmer seasons and warmer months becoming more common owing to human-induced climate change, water management in the UK may soon become an annual struggle. Yorkshire Water states:
“According to the Met Office, spring 2025 was also the warmest spring for mean temperature since records began in 1884 and the second sunniest spring in England since sunshine records began in 1910.”
Are water companies or customers to blame?
The company itself recently announced a £16mn investment in reducing leakage from its clean water network this year, as it aims to meet its reduction targets. Karen Atkinson, manager of leakage reduction at Yorkshire Water, commented:
“While we have lots of proactive work to do to help us meet our targets and conserve water, customers can also play an important role in water conservation – reporting leaks that they spot in their areas is incredibly valuable to us. I’d encourage anyone who spots something that looks like a leak to reach out to us so that we can investigate and resolve it quickly.”
Demand certainly is a factor in warmer weather, with every month this year having a higher customer demand in megalitres in the region than at the same time over the past few years.
Does this justify the increase to customers’ bills?
Customers of Yorkshire Water will also face an increase of 41% in their bills over the next five years, from £430 annually to £607, leaving customers angry at having to face potential reductions in their usage while paying a higher price. Since April, calls for water companies to be brought into public ownership have increased, particularly as bills have risen. It is argued that this should take place via a process known as special administration, as a means of reducing the cost to close to zero. Customers are also questioning how private water industries have been managed, especially when stocks and resources are low, causing a threat to vulnerable people.
With the Yorkshire Water “temporary usage ban” now in place, customers are starting to question whether bills should be reduced to reflect this ban.
Facing a water shortage
Reservoir levels play an important part in supplies for drinking water in the UK as well and a summer drought, although alarming, is also not the main problem.
Yorkshire Water concluded their statement by warning that further falls in water levels might even continue until the winter months, suggesting that more restrictions and temporary usage bans might follow. “These restrictions are intended to make sure that we have enough supply for the essential needs of people across the region this year and next, as well as making sure we’re able to protect our local environment. With more dry weather forecast in the coming weeks, it is likely our stocks will continue to fall so we need to act now to maintain clean water supplies and long-term river health.
“The restrictions will come into effect on 11 July and will be in place until the region has seen significant rainfall to bring reservoirs and groundwater stocks back to where they need to be. This may last into the winter months, but we will lift the usage restrictions as soon as we are able.”
Even if the UK manages somehow to protect water supplies this summer, the threat of water shortages is not going away anytime soon.
