Lord Smith: The man who hopes his flow of ideas will save UK from drought

Michael McCarthy in the Independent: Sooner or later, they'll be calling him the Drought Tsar. And Lord Smith of Finsbury, the chairman of the Environment Agency, has a clear idea of what should be done about the chronic water shortage which is already affecting southern England, and may get progressively worse despite occasional days of rainfall.

Water companies should build interconnecting links so that they can share water easily, and move it around the country in drought periods, he feels.

Such a system would be as effective as the expensive national water grid which is sometimes proposed to deal with Britain's north-south rainfall imbalance, but far quicker to put in place, and far less costly. Lord Smith, who, as Chris Smith MP, was Labour's Culture Secretary in Tony Blair's first administration from 1997 to 2001, is somebody we will be hearing a lot more from, now that south-east England and much of the Midlands are officially in drought, after two of the driest winters on record, and with no sign of the heavens opening to replenish reservoirs. As the environmental regulator of the water industry, he will be the public face of drought control if an emergency arises during the summer.

There are fears the current drought may equal or exceed that of 1976, which was so severe that some consumers had to take water supplies from standpipes. Lord Smith does not think it will get that bad. "The water companies have learned a lot of lessons over the last 10 years, and I'm pretty certain we'll be able to keep domestic water supplies running," he says. But he is concerned about the impact of serious water shortages on agriculture and industry, and in particular on the level of flow in rivers....

A reservoir above Inverness, shot by David Maclennan, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license