Devon Cannot Build Its Future on a Water Deficit
by David Palethorpe
South-West Water delivered a letter of 7 August 2026 asking, in fact informing, households across Devon and the wider South-West to accept restrictions on hosepipe use because prolonged dry weather, below-average rainfall and sustained demand have put water supplies under exceptional pressure.
In the immediate drought, residents have been asked to use water responsibly.
Every litre saved helps.
The letter raises a much larger question that cannot be answered simply by asking residents to turn off their hosepipes:
“If Devon’s water system is under this much stress and pressure today, how will it support the scale of housing and economic development planned for the decades ahead”?
That question must be answered now because Devon (and the rest of the country) is being required to build at significant pace.
Teignbridge’s newly adopted Local Plan provides for a forward housing requirement of 720 homes a year for five years and a minimum of 14,400 homes over the plan period.
Plymouth, South Hams and West Devon are currently assessed against a standard-method requirement of 2,603 homes a year, excluding the Dartmoor allowance; their latest assessment identifies only 2.33 years of deliverable housing supply against that requirement.
Mid Devon’s current calculation is around 572 homes annually. In East Devon, the emerging large scale new community is being planned on the scale of around 10,000 homes.
These are not marginal additions.
They represent major additional demands on water supply, sewerage, roads, schools, healthcare and energy infrastructure.
Devon urgently needs housing.
Affordability and availability are serious problems, and the answer cannot simply be to stop building.
But responsible planning cannot mean allocating thousands of homes first and discovering afterwards that the infrastructure necessary to support them is inadequate.
“Water must become an infrastructure-first test for development”.
South-West Water’s Water Resources Management Plan exists precisely to consider how supply and demand can be balanced over the next 25 years and how reliable supplies can be maintained while protecting the environment.
That long-term planning is increasingly important because climate change is altering the assumptions on which previous infrastructure was designed.
The Environment Agency says climate change is increasing the risk of drought, while the Met Office projects hotter and drier UK summers as the climate warms.
The consequences are already becoming familiar: higher peak demand, falling river flows, stressed ecosystems and reservoirs being drawn down more quickly.
In July this year, the Environment Agency reported record soil-moisture deficits across south-west England and classified some reservoirs as exceptionally low for the time of year.
Climate change therefore changes the planning equation.
We cannot treat water as an unlimited resource that simply appears whenever another housing allocation is added to a Local Plan.
Nor can increased abstraction from rivers and catchments be the automatic answer, because those same water systems support wildlife, farming, tourism and the landscapes on which Devon’s economy depends.
Public concerns about South-West Water must also be taken seriously.
South-West Water and its parent company Pennon rightly point to substantial investment now being made.
Pennon reported £588.5 million of investment in its water businesses in 2025/26.
That investment is welcome.
But spending today does not remove legitimate questions about whether sufficient investment was made early enough, whether resilience kept pace with population growth and climate risk, and why emergency restrictions have again become necessary.
Confidence has also been damaged by South-West Water’s wider environmental record.
In the Environment Agency’s 2024 assessment, the company had the worst sewerage pollution-incident rate among England’s water and sewerage companies.
Drinking-water resources and sewage performance are different issues, but both influence public confidence in the stewardship of an essential private utility.
The solution requires a much clearer division of responsibilities between developers, councils and South-West Water.
Developers should pay the proper cost of infrastructure directly required by their development.
South-West Water’s current charging arrangements already include new connections, infrastructure charges and water-main requisitions.
Councils can also use planning conditions and Section 106 agreements to mitigate development impacts.
But there is an important legal distinction.
Section 106 obligations must be necessary to make development acceptable, directly related to the development and fairly and reasonably related to it in scale and kind.
In other words, developers should pay for the additional burden they create.
They cannot simply be handed the bill for decades of deficiencies in a regional utility network.
“Historic underinvestment and strategic network resilience remain responsibilities of the regulated water company and the regulatory system”.
What councils can do is demand much stronger evidence before major developments proceed.
For substantial Local Plan allocations, we should require up-to-date water-cycle and infrastructure assessments.
Before thousands of homes are occupied, communities should be able to see where their water will come from, what treatment and storage capacity is available, what reinforcement is required, when it will be delivered and who is financially responsible.
Planning permissions for major developments should be phased where necessary so that housing occupation does not run ahead of essential water and wastewater infrastructure.
New development must also become part of the solution.
Water-efficient fittings, smart meters, rainwater harvesting, grey-water reuse, sustainable drainage and landscaping designed to minimise potable-water consumption can substantially reduce future demand.
The Government has itself consulted on tightening water-efficiency standards for new homes, recognising the need to reconcile housing growth with water scarcity.
This approach is entirely consistent with Liberal Democrat policy.
At the 2025 Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference, members adopted the For People, For Planet climate policy.
It recognises that droughts, heatwaves and other climate impacts are becoming more severe and calls for climate resilience to be built into decision-making.
Liberal Democrat policy specifically supports stronger planning and regulatory frameworks, water-supply enhancements and investment to protect communities against drought, flooding and heatwaves.
For Liberal Democrats in Devon, that means protecting scarce natural resources while also delivering the homes local people need.
It means demanding faster leakage reduction, resilient reservoirs and networks, stronger protection for rivers and catchments, and much greater water efficiency from every major new development.
It is not anti-development.
It is sustainable development.
There is a simple principle at stake: the environmental cost of growth should not be transferred to existing residents, while the consequences of historic infrastructure decisions should not be transferred wholesale to new homeowners and developers.
South-West Water’s letter asks every household to play its part during this drought.
That is reasonable.
But residents are entitled to ask the same of South-West Water, developers, regulators and government.
Devon needs homes.
It needs jobs and economic growth.
It also needs clean rivers and secure water supplies.
Those ambitions are compatible —
“but only if infrastructure comes with development, rather than years behind it”.
For every major Local Plan allocation, the test should therefore be straightforward:
Show us the water.
Show us the capacity.
Show us the infrastructure.
Show us who is paying for it.
And show us that it will be delivered before the homes depend upon it.
That is how Devon can grow while protecting one of its most precious — and increasingly scarce — natural resources.
Cllr David Palethorpe
Teignbridge District Council
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