When will we wake up to the real water scandal?

Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph
"As the rain pours down, our reservoirs fill and hosepipe bans are ended, we must not allow this Act of God – unforeseen, as usual, by the Met Office – to distract us from the utter shambles of our national water policy. ...Accordingly, no fewer than five major new reservoir schemes have been scrapped in south-east England alone, where the shortage of water is most severe – two of them last year by our Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman. In obedience to the EU’s guidelines, her White Paper “Water for Life”, full of references to “climate change”, was all about how we must cut down our water usage and use it more “efficiently”, not least by encouraging our largely foreign-owned water companies to make this “precious resource” more expensive. The fact is that, since the 1980s, we have spent so much – £67 billion in the period up to 2007 – on complying with the absurdly exacting requirements of three EU directives on water quality that we have spent less than a quarter of that sum on “infrastructure”, such as mending leaks."