A hosepipe ban is not a water cut

Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 3rd August 2026 Time to read: 5 minutes

Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.

There is a very large difference between being told that you cannot wash the car and being told that nothing at all is coming out of your taps, and at the time of writing England is firmly in the first of those situations and nowhere near the second. We think that is worth saying plainly, because somewhere in between the headlines about the end of days and the photographs of brown lawns there is a sensible conversation to be had about the water in your home.

Here is what has actually happened. The Environment Agency has declared drought across seven areas of England, which between them cover more than half the country, and around 40% of the English population is now living under a hosepipe ban. Thames Water brought its ban in on 23rd July for slightly over 10 million customers, having reported demand running about 10% above normal in the Thames Valley, which works out at an extra 100 million litres every single day. The Met Office has provisionally recorded England at 5.6mm of rainfall for July, which is 8% of the long-term average and less than half the previous record of 13.4mm set back in 1911, with southern England on a frankly astonishing 1.5mm. On those provisional figures it is the driest July in roughly 190 years.

So what is a hosepipe ban, exactly?

A hosepipe ban — or a Temporary Use Ban, to give it the name your water company will use in the letter — is a demand management tool. It is what a water company does when its own drought plan tells it that the gap between what people are using and what the weather is putting back has become uncomfortable, and it is designed to close that gap early, precisely so that the more serious measures further down the plan never have to be reached. It is the system working rather than the system failing.

What it is not is an interruption to your supply. Your taps will run, your toilet will flush, and the water coming out of both will be perfectly safe to drink. We did notice that the chair of the National Drought Group described this as an exceptionally serious situation with long-lasting consequences for the environment, wildlife and the economy — but she is talking about rivers, farms and habitats, which are in genuine trouble, rather than about your kitchen sink.

Why we still think this is the week to sort your water out

Because nobody, and we really do mean nobody, buys water containers in February when it is raining sideways! The unglamorous truth about household preparedness is that it is almost entirely a matter of doing one boring thing once, at a moment when you happen to be thinking about it, and then never having to think about it again. This is one of those moments. Not because the taps are about to stop, because they are not, but because burst mains, maintenance work and flooding all arrive with no warning whatsoever, and the households that cope well with them are simply the ones that did the boring thing beforehand.

As a rough rule-of-thumb we work on 10 litres per person per day once you have allowed for drinking, cooking and a minimum of washing, which mounts up a great deal faster than most people expect. We go through the arithmetic properly, including the under-bed storage maths and what a pallet of bottled water actually weighs, in our article ‘What to do when the water has been turned off’.

What we would actually buy

You are genuinely spoilt for choice, and the real question is never which container is best but where on earth you are going to put it. Storage you cannot reach, or that you resent looking at, is storage you will quietly get rid of in two years' time.

AquaBrick 3 Gallon Long Term Water Storage Container (6 pack) at c.£200-£275 – six stackable food-grade bricks giving you almost 82 litres, and the reason we keep coming back to them is the shape, which slides under a bed or into the cupboard under the stairs and looks considerably less alarming to visitors than a row of barrels.

105L Flat Tanks at c.£140-£180 each – the flat profile is the whole point, as two of these will sit under a double bed on risers and a third under a single, which gets a couple to over 300 litres without surrendering the garage. Budget for taps and delivery on top.

25 Litre Jerry Can Water Container at c.£12-£16 – who doesn't like a jerry can, especially at that price! You would need about a dozen for a couple, but they are a weight most people can carry and you can spread them around the house rather than concentrating the lot in one spot.

Folding Water Container 10L (2-pack) at c.£10-£14 – these live flat in a drawer until the day you need them, and if you take nothing else from this article, two of these in a kitchen cupboard is the cheapest sensible thing you can do this week.

Oasis 67mg Water Purification Tablets (200) at c.£7-£9 – small, cheap, and they belong in your grab bag rather than under the sink. Always read the label and consult a pharmacist if unsure.

The one thing a hosepipe ban should actually change

If you have a garden and you have been meaning to get a water butt, this is your week, because rainwater collected in your own butt sits entirely outside the ban and you can use it on the garden as much as you like. A Water Butts Direct 100L Slimline Mini Water Butt Kit at c.£35-£45 is the low-commitment version for a small space, and the Storm Trading Group 250L Water Butt XL with Stand & Tap at c.£80-£100 is what we would fit if there is room, on the basis that the difference in effort between installing a small one and a large one is essentially nil. There is an obvious catch, which is that it needs to rain, and it is going to be a slow start!

Your to do list is:

• Check whether your water company has a ban in force — seven of them do, and the letter may well have gone to an old address.

• Buy two folding 10L containers and put them in a kitchen cupboard. Ten minutes, c.£10-£14, done.

• Work out where 100 to 300 litres could actually live in your home, before you buy anything larger.

• Put purification tablets in your grab bag if they are not already in there.

• Fit a water butt if you have a garden, and use it on the plants with a clear conscience.

• Sign up to your water company's Priority Services Register if you or someone you love would struggle in an outage.

If you want the whole picture rather than the water-shaped slice of it, our ‘The complete UK household emergency preparedness guide’ pulls it together, and ‘Hygiene is everything with Slightly Anxious’ covers the part of a water outage that nobody enjoys discussing but everybody remembers afterwards.

And finally

We are aware that there is a version of this article which shouts at you about the driest July since the reign of William the Fourth and tells you to fill every receptacle in the house tonight, and we are not going to write it, because you would quite rightly stop reading us. The taps are fine. The rivers are not, the farmers are having a genuinely miserable summer, and the sensible response for you and your loved ones is not panic but ten minutes of quiet organisation on a Monday evening while the story is still in your head. Do the boring thing once, and then go and enjoy the sunshine, because on the current figures there is quite a lot of it left.

Remember, keep calm and visit us here.

This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight