Since early June rainfall has been only 40 per cent of the average and unless we have very heavy rain soon, this summer will go down as the driest since records began in 1727.Yet today’s shortages began not because of record dryness – in spring, reservoirs, rivers and aquifers were brim-full – but because of record demand. After five years in which water bills rose by an average of 5 per cent above inflation, industry regulator Ian Byatt last year bowed to public exasperation and restricted increases to 1.5 per cent above inflation for the next five.So is England (almost all recent British droughts have been English ones) doomed to repeated hose pipe bans?It depends on the weather. The industry is losing 24 per cent of its water through leakage, and estimates a cost of pounds 400m to lop off each percentage point.
The job would entail speeding up the refurbishment and replacement of mains and improving leakage detection and repair. Local mains and service reservoirs would need re-engineering to cope with hot weather surges in demand; large storage reservoirs would be needed as well as transfer schemes to shift water from wet Wales and Scotland to dry eastern and southern England.Under present rules, this is not going to happen this century. The cost would be another pounds 2bn a year, on top of the pounds 2.8bn a year the industry is now spending in England and Wales.

BRITAIN could have a drought-proof, leak-proof water supply system by around the turn of the century, the water companies say, but water bills would have to be increased sharply again to achieve it. It will be interesting to see how the “inner sanctum” copes with that.On the Road, p11. The theme is education, and Hattersley has consistently attacked “new Labour” policy on the issue. Richard Burden may be dismissed as a back-bench nobody, unhappy at not being given a front-bench job. But the former deputy leader, who has more experience of government than the entire Shadow Cabinet put together, fires a heavier salvo He will be speaking shortly after the leader’s address. Tribune, for so long the socialist conscience of the Labour Party, will this week announce that Roy Hattersley, the Gaitskellite scourge of the Left, is to join its platform for a conference fringe meeting in Brighton.

A good many could have come straight out of the hard-Left’s golden age in the mid- eighties, indicating that the activists have changed less than Labour’s glossy image.Some change is unexpected, indicating that perhaps Blair has gone too far in beating the Tories at their own game. They are happy just paying their subs.” The tenor of the motions to conference bears out this anecdotal evidence. One north- east MP, a strong proponent of “new Labour”, laments: “I have got three hundred new members in my constituency But I never see them They don’t come to meetings. Half of the party has joined since the last election, vast swathes of them since he became leader. Yet the sharp rise in members is not necessarily accompanied by an increase in participation. I suspect he wants to do in the unions completely, not give them any say in policy-making.”In this development, Blair is helped by the surge in party membership, now well over 300,000. “There is no doubt that a decision was taken that he would have a presidential leadership,” said one “Everything would come from his office He wants everything under the control of the leader This is the strategy.