England is in drought. We need to learn from Europe on water reuse.
England heads into autumn with the driest July on record, 70% of the country officially in drought and 27 million people under water-use restrictions. Westminster’s reflex is concrete: nine new reservoirs to catch and store more rain. Yet when the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee reported in May that England “is not short of rain” but fails both to store that rain and to reuse its treated wastewater, the debate focused on storage capacity and largely passed over reuse. Water reuse means treating wastewater to a quality that is safe for a defined new purpose, such as irrigating crops — a different exercise from harvesting rain. Every day, water treatment works release billions of litres of well-treated effluent into rivers and the sea, while farmers face tightening abstraction licences.
With the Burnham government pressing ahead with the UK–EU reset — linking emissions trading, negotiating a common food-standards area, and seeking access to the EU electricity market — it is tempting to ask whether a water regulation should join the list. Honesty first: nothing requires it to. Water is not traded across the Channel and the UK’s only shared catchments with the EU are on the island of Ireland. The EU’s Water Reuse Regulation (2020/741) is not part of these negotiations. It is, however, the most developed supranational framework for safe, scalable water reuse, and Britain can study its results for free.
Applicable since June 2023, the Regulation sets harmonised minimum requirements for irrigating crops with reclaimed water: four quality classes matched to crop and irrigation method, mandatory risk management plans, and a “fit-for-purpose” philosophy that matches water quality requirements to the intended use and its risks.
For a study published this year, my co-authors and I interviewed 23 experts among regulators, utilities, farming representatives and scientists, including stakeholders at the Braunschweig urban wastewater treatment plant in Germany, where reclaimed water has been used for agricultural irrigation for decades. The central finding was that the constraints are not primarily technological but legal, economic and social. In a word: governance.
Three lessons stand out for the UK.
First, clarity. The Regulation tightly governs planned reuse, yet water abstracted downstream of a wastewater treatment plant — namely indirect reuse, widespread in practice — falls outside its scope. This creates an asymmetry that reduces trust, and that would need to be addressed in the Commission’s evaluation by 2028.
Second, proportionality. Where national authorities add to the EU’s requirements, as in Germany’s debate over bacteriological standards approaching drinking-water levels and tighter thresholds for trace substances, operators warn that reuse could become financially unviable, risking a drift back to rivers and aquifers. This is a result of national caution, not a flaw in the Regulation itself.
Third, trust. “Acceptance is always a question of scarcity,” one interviewee told us. Farmers engage where water is short and the numbers work; retailers and certification schemes could exclude producers irrigated with reclaimed water before consumers are even informed; and a single word — “wastewater” — can undermine trust and sink a reuse scheme.
England is running its own case study in governance failure. As the Guardian reported two weeks ago, the UK’s largest water reuse system at Eddington in Cambridge, ready since 2021, has never been switched on: supplying recycled rainwater for non-drinking uses sits awkwardly within drinking-water law written decades ago. Residents in one of England’s driest regions could now save around 25 litres per person daily. The pattern mirrors what emerged from our European interviews: willing operators, working technology, but absent rules. For agricultural reuse the gap is wider still — England has no equivalent framework at all.
Taking the European experience seriously means putting the institutional plumbing in place, not copying treaty text: a competent authority, permitting routes, quality classes, practical risk-management guidance, support for smaller operators, and public communication before the first scheme opens, not after the first scare. The EU’s growing pains are the map — a tight implementation window, uneven national uptake, a first risk plan of nearly a thousand pages, whose very detail then secured a flexible, site-specific permit.
There is one potential connection to the UK–EU reset. A food-standards area built on dynamic alignment would make production standards part of the trust infrastructure of trade. Water reuse is not among the legislation identified for sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) alignment, but our interviews already flagged the underlying tension: what happens when the same produce, irrigated under different reuse rules, crosses borders? For Britain the question is immediate: much of its fruit and vegetables comes from the continent, including from regions that already irrigate with reclaimed water. Nowhere would this matter more than on the island of Ireland, where catchments are shared and Lough Neagh, the UK’s largest lake, is choking on algal blooms fed by nutrient pollution, much of it linked to agriculture.
Britain does not need to copy Brussels wholesale. But England does need a water reuse framework, and Europe has already drafted, implemented and begun testing one. A government that is again willing to work with the EU should read it, learn from it — and write its own.
Patricia Allgaier is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. Her study of the implementation of Regulation (EU) 2020/741, co-authored with Roberta Maffettone (European Commission Joint Research Centre) and Kevin Grecksch (University of Oxford), was published open access in Environmental Policy and Governance (2026), doi: 10.1002/eet.70082. She writes in a personal capacity.
