For the love of mike!
Look; what's going on is that water companies are acting now to deal with a problem that may otherwise come to a head later in the summer. All credit to them for doing so. By stopping the use of hosepipes for, for example, watering lawns now, they are working to ensure that there will be no need for more draconian measures later.
What you're getting from the media is this week's bunch of media hysteria. They'll have moved onto something new next week. Just ignore it and the headlines truly will go away. However, the potential problem may not, so you need to make sensible plans on how to deal with it.
By the way, here's my top tip for a happy life. Stop reading the daily papers and watching the daily news. Get a weekly paper or journal instead, if you must. They tend not to have space for hysterical stories so you get a more balanced and reasoned view. I stopped reading dailies several years ago and I've never been happier.
Vin
I quite agree about newspaper reading. Although I take a daily sometimes, I tend to keep to the less sensationalist papers such as "i" - IMO the best daily out there for facts rather than opinions.
An interesting link that you posted. I do remember those drought hearings a few years ago. The first two were classics. I imagine that the water companies thought they were up against, amongst others, a load of "thick as doodoo" window cleaners. Craig Mawlam, and others, wiped the floor with them. He led them down a number of tempting alleys and when they got sucked in, he made them look pretty stupid. If ever I was in the dock, I'd rather have him represent me than any solicitor. I analysed what he was doing, as far as I could, and it became a lot clearer to me how he had managed to build a large business or few. Ionics has its knockers on here but the bit I find it hard to fault them on is presentation, both of their business and of the window cleaning industry at a public hearing (though I accept Craig was there for the FWC rather than for Ionics/BWCA). My hunch is that we would pretty much be left alone until we got into, or close to, standpipe territory. By the time it gets that far, the window cleaners' case is far more difficult to argue because you could be choosing between having drinking water/failure of public water supply versus cleaning windows by pole.
Back in the 80s, Margaret "Tina" Thatcher's mantra was "One man's pay rise is another man's job loss.". It is both appalling and preventable that it could later become "One man's bath is another man's job loss."
If things do end up getting worse, I think the water companies would be surprised to find that many window cleaners can be pretty accommodating. Personally, to help prevent a crisis, I would be open to squeegeeing reachable windows. I would also be open to running on resin only even though I receive hard water. Those two measures alone could potentially achieve a 75% reduction in water usage. OK it would cost me more to run my business plus I would earn less (or work longer for the same) but I'm not such an ogre that I wouldn't be prepared to do my bit.
