Millions of people are at risk of being left without adequate supplies of drinking water due to poor infrastructure or cyber attack, according to the government’s own assessment of national risk.
Britain’s drinking water supply has been officially rated a “catastrophic” national risk on a par with a pandemic, according to the government’s own National Risk Register.
The 2026 register, which was published earlier this week, shows the risk of “water infrastructure failure or loss of drinking water” has jumped from the bottom of the government’s risk matrix last year to the top of the danger zone this year – the category reserved for the gravest threats facing the country.
The likelihood of a catastrophic impact on supply is now assessed at up to one in four.
It comes after tens of thousands of people were left without drinking water between November 2025 and January this year in Tunbridge Wells, Kent and Sussex due to the failure of a South East Water treatment works.
Upto 70,000 homes were left without water, with 24,000 homes in Tunbridge Wells affected.
Households were left with either no water supply at all for several days, or having to boil water. Locals had to queue for bottled water to hydrate pets, wash and clean, with locals collecting rain water in buckets to flush toilets.
Water supply same risk as pandemic
In the 2025 register, the same risk to water supply was rated low likelihood and minor impact. In the new edition, it has been rescored to sit alongside pandemic as one of only two risks rated highest for both likelihood and impact – the register’s most severe possible combination.
The reassessment covers a scenario in which one or more water treatment works fail, cutting off piped supply to a region or degrading it so badly it is unsafe to drink even after boiling, with knock-on disruption to schools, hospitals and prisons until alternative supplies are restored.
The upgrade comes as the government separately adds, for the first time, a specific risk of a cyber attack on water infrastructure – one of seven new entries in this year’s register.
Ministers attribute the addition of a cyber attack to the rapid increase in the sophistication and proliferation of artificial intelligence, which is making critical infrastructure a more attractive target for hostile actors.
The cyber risk is listed separately from the pre-existing water-supply risk, meaning the register now carries two distinct warnings over the same infrastructure: one covering physical or operational failure, the other covering deliberate attack.
The findings emerge as Andy Burnham prepares to enter Downing Street as Prime Minister on Monday, succeeding Keir Starmer.
Bloomberg reported this week that Burnham’s team has asked civil servants to prepare plans to bring Thames Water, Britain’s largest and most indebted water company, under public control within days of him taking office.
Options under consideration include a form of temporary public administration for Thames Water and a longer-term move to convert water companies into mutualised, not-for-profit organisations owned by billpayers rather than shareholders.
Burnham is understood to favour the mutualisation route as a cheaper and more deliverable alternative to full nationalisation.
‘A moment of realisation’
Lucy Easthope, an international advisor on disaster recovery, told The i Paper: “This is a moment of realisation. It’s not that the risk has changed; it’s that people have woken up to it.
A few things have stopped being possibles and reasonable worst case scenarios and they have now become a reality. This includes a complete outage over a prolonged period of time.”
Easthope believes that the water supply failures in Tunbridge Wells last year were an important reason why the level of risk was raised.
The failures showed that the country’s water system might be more vulnerable than previously thought.
The continuing trend of hotter weather, which can increase pressure on water supplies, was another factor considered in the higher risk assessment.
Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South and prominent Burnham backer, said: “The National Risk Register tells a remarkable story. Every year the list of threats grows more interconnected.
“The the challenge of the next decade isn’t simply managing crises. It’s building a state capable of producing resilience before those crises arrive. And unfortunately, they will.”
Posting on X he added: “This is where 36 years of privatised water has brought us.”
Cost of privatisation
Water in England and Wales has been privately owned since 1989. Since then, according to figures cited by campaigners, including Lewis, water companies have paid out an estimated £85 billion in dividends while amassing more than £60 billion in debt secured against the network.
Thames Water’s financial troubles have deepened over the past two years, with the company’s creditors -including Elliott Management, Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Silver Point Capital and Invesco – now seeking concessions from the incoming government.
The Cabinet Office’s description of the water-supply risk does not attribute rne upgrade to the ownership structure of the industry; it points instead to physical infrastructure vulnerability and, in the case of the newly added risk, cyber threats.
The National Risk Register is the public-facing version of the classified National Security Risk Assessment, which the Civil Contingencies Secretariat compiles for government planning purposes.
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