When a business measures its performance, the absolute number is rarely the interesting part. What matters is the distance to the target.
The water industry has no shortage of these numbers. Supply demand balance, headroom and deficit, leakage rates, per capita consumption reductions, storm overflow counts, water quality and customer service standards. Every one of them measures how far a water company sits from where it needs to be.
Businesses that use water often have none of them, and if they do, do they share them with their water company?
Energy made the gap visible. If you have a smart meter you can switch an appliance on and off and watch what it costs you. Water does not work that way, and it is still not clear how much visibility customers will get even once they move to smart meters. Price will not do the work either. When energy becomes scarce the price rises and demand falls. That doesn’t yet happen with water, which is too essential to public health to ration by cost without knowledge of what the water is being used for.
So the economic case for using less water cannot rest on the price of the water itself. It must come from somewhere else, and we need to find it while climate extreme records are being broken more frequently.
For those of us who work in the water sector, the motivation is plain enough. Do nothing, and England faces a shortfall of around 5 billion litres a day for public water supply by 2055. That number moves water companies and regulators. It does not move a small business, when water is likely one of its least expensive commodities in its supply chain.
What actually moves a business
Risk does.
Every business relies on water to operate. No water means no toilets, unless you have invested in waterless urinals or flush with harvested rain. Work with livestock or plant stock and the exposure is sharper still. A plant nursery cannot hold stock levels if its abstraction licence is cut. A grower loses yield under a Water Resources Act, section 57 order. A farmer who cannot cut enough silage after a flood or a drought reduces the size of the herd before the winter comes.
That is where the economic driver comes from: the business risk of having too much water or too little, and the growing chance of facing restrictions on the mains supply. Too much water at the wrong time is also costly. Household have specific flood insurance options available. Businesses have to negotiate flood cover on their own terms and can find it repriced or withdrawn. Decarbonisation still takes the agenda, and it should, yet the Climate Change Committee’s adaptation reporting keeps making the same point: most organisations will feel the climate through water first.
Rainwater is the cheaper half of the answer
Businesses that can invest may already have storage to catch the winter rainfall, which is increasing in the UK. Rain needs less treatment for outdoor use than water reused inside a building, so it is simpler and cheaper to use for purposes such as irrigation, and plant roots prefer it over mains water, irrigation lines do not block with limescale, and expensive acid dosing can be reduced.
The gap nobody measures
How many businesses have water on their risk register? They may measure their usage, but how many measure the efficiency of their usage? How much of the difference could come from rain, from grey water, or from not using water at all?
Horticulture has some of the answers. In the Horticultural Trades Association’s 2025 water survey, 88% of businesses said restrictions on mains or abstracted water would seriously harm them or threaten their survival, yet only 30% of growers, and none of the garden centres, had a contingency plan if supply were curtailed. Growers can store 28% of their annual water need on site, garden centres around 38%.
The retail side of the risk is worse than it looks, just talk of a temporary use ban is enough on its own to cancel orders for plants, because plant retailers cut their stock before the ban arrives and sales drop. Is there another gap worth measuring? the lost profit from plant sales in a hosepipe ban compared with profits made on selling hosepipes and sprinklers. Would that make the business case for changing the way we garden?
Policy leaves the gap open for water used outdoors
Three pieces of policy could change things.
- Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 has still not been enacted in England, so sustainable drainage standards remain voluntary. Those standards put rainwater reuse at the top of the hierarchy, because managing the rain where it lands help reduce the risks of drought and flood. We have to re–learn how to make use of the largest reservoir we have, the soil under our feet, and SuDS helps us do that.
- The Mandatory Water Efficiency Labelling Scheme should become a legal requirement this year, but it covers showers, taps, toilets, dishwashers, washing machines and washer dryers, nothing outdoors. No label on a sprinkler, a hose or an irrigation system, and outdoor use is exactly where a business could switch to rainwater.
- Reusing the rain cuts mains water demand and can reduce what reaches the sewer in a storm, but water efficiency and storm overflow programmes are funded and evaluated separately, so a scheme that does both gets counted for one or the other, not both.
Reporting may yet force change. The UK Sustainability Reporting Standards were finalised in February 2026 and are voluntary for now, with the Financial Conduct Authority expected to publish final rules in autumn 2026 for listed companies to report from 2027, and a consultation on extending mandatory reporting to the largest private companies. Water is not a line in that framework. It sits inside the wider sustainability risks a company judges to be material. So how many UK businesses will decide water is material, and how many of those will have the data to say anything useful about it?
Start with the number
The businesses that measure the gap first will be the ones holding a case for investment before the water restrictions arrive, rather than after.
Creating a water management plan for a business is not difficult. It takes a view of what a business uses, what comparable businesses use, and how much of that could come from rain rather than mains. The analysis is well within reach. The reason it rarely happens is that we are failing to spot the real water related risks ahead quickly enough, and we assume it all rests with water companies or the Government.
That is starting to change as more climate records are broken.
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