How do you get people in a seemingly rain-soaked country to save water?

People in the UK rarely think about how much water they’re using. Unlike hotter, drier countries, we don’t have a shared sense of water as a precious resource.

But our world is changing. Wetter winters and hotter, drier summers are putting water infrastructure under increasing strain. And we now know more about how water loss damages forests, habitats and wildlife too.

To stave off droughts, the UK needs to cut its water use by five billion litres every day by 2055. The regulator, Ofwat, asked us build the evidence base and strategy foundations that would help them to change people’s behaviour. We kicked this off by reviewing published academic evidence and consumer research on the topic of water conservation.

Our work showed that, before campaigns could talk about the ‘How’ of saving water, they would need to establish a ‘Why’: the reason that people should care. Crucially, this ‘Why’ had to be sufficiently credible and memorable to fight the pervasive narrative of ‘the UK is a rainy country’

Working with Ofwat, The Environment Agency and Defra, we identified potential ‘Why’ narratives and tested three of them with regional water companies. The insights from these tests, along with the wider strategy recommendations, fed into an awareness and behaviour change campaign being developed by the a Water Efficiency Campaign delivery body.

The full strategy is scheduled to be published by Ofwat in July 2026

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