Up and down the country, households under a hosepipe ban are being told to put the hose away. What gets said far less often is what is happening underground at the same time: the water network in England and Wales leaks close to three billion litres a day, roughly one in every five litres it treats. Set against that, the sums behind a ban start to look very different.
What a ban actually saves
A Temporary Use Ban is a real tool, but a modest one. Industry research puts the saving at around 5 to 10% of household demand, and only for as long as the ban lasts and only in the area it covers. The best-documented real example is Yorkshire Water’s 2022 ban, which cut demand by about 10%, saving in the region of 80 million litres a day across a region of some five million people. Tellingly, water companies rarely publish the actual saving a given ban delivers, so the restriction lands squarely on customers while the payoff stays vague.
What leaks lose, every single day
Now the other side of the ledger. On the industry’s own figures, leaks across England and Wales run at about 2,967 million litres a day, averaged over the three years to March 2025 – near enough three billion litres, or close to 1,200 Olympic swimming pools, lost every day of the year. This is not a heatwave spike or a one-off: it is a constant, year-round loss of roughly a fifth of all the water that is treated and pumped into the system. A running hosepipe, by comparison, gets through around 1,000 litres an hour, the equivalent of eight baths.
One company’s leaks, a whole region’s ban
Put the two side by side and the gap is hard to unsee. Thames Water alone loses about 592 million litres a day, the worst record of any supplier, and that is roughly seven times the daily saving that Yorkshire Water’s region-wide ban achieved. Plugging the leaks at a single company would save far more water, permanently, than asking millions of households to give up the hose for a summer. Campaigners put it bluntly: leaky pipes waste several times more water than hosepipe bans ever save.
Both things can be true
None of this makes a ban pointless. When reservoirs are low, cutting demand quickly and cheaply buys time, and every household doing its bit genuinely helps in an acute drought. But it only feels fair if the companies are visibly holding up their end. The regulator has set the industry a target to halve leakage by 2050, and the real test of a drought summer is whether the pipes are being fixed as fast as customers are being asked to cut back. A hose left coiled up matters most when the mains beneath the street are being mended too.
Where your own effort really counts
There is a wider lesson here, and it applies just as much to your energy bill: effort is worth most where you actually have control. You cannot mend the water main under your street, but at home the levers are firmly in your hands. Cutting the waste you can see, from standby power to a thermostat turned up too high, and switching to a cheaper deal will do more for your budget than any single restriction. Our guide to making your home more energy efficient shows where to start; it takes minutes to compare energy tariffs; and if the heat is the real strain this summer, our heatwave guide covers the essentials.