The UK Environment Agency declared drought across 51.4 percent of England on July 29, covering seven areas including London, East Anglia, southwest England and the West Midlands [1].
The number matters because the declaration is not a description of the weather. It is an administrative act. Declaring drought is what moves an area into a regime where restrictions on water use can be imposed and enforced, and the agency has now placed more than half of England's land area into that regime at once.
The agency's own account of conditions: "Rivers are running low, farmers are having to harvest crops early, wildfire risk is increasing, and millions of people are living under restrictions on water use" [1]. The agency characterised the event as a rapidly developing flash drought, and noted that this is the second consecutive summer of drought in parts of England [1].
What produced it is on this desk's record from earlier tonight. England and Wales recorded their driest July on record, with England receiving 6.5mm of rain against a previous record low of 13.4mm set in 1911 [2]. England's July total is therefore 48.5 percent of the record it replaced, which is to say the old record was beaten by nearly half rather than shaved. Rainfall across the period ran at roughly 7 percent of the expected nationwide total, and roughly 1 percent in parts of the south [2]. Those two figures are broadly consistent with one another: 6.5mm at about 7 percent implies an expected July total somewhere near 90mm, an approximation of ours rather than a published figure.
A record that stood for 115 years is a useful measure of what has just happened. The comparison is with 1911, and the margin is not narrow.
Take the two halves of the agency's sentence separately, because they describe different kinds of loss.
The farming half is immediate and largely irreversible within the season. Harvesting early is not a precaution, it is a concession, made when a crop will not gain any more from being left in the ground and might lose what it already has. East Anglia sits inside the declared area [1], and East Anglia is where a large share of England's arable production happens. Whatever was taken early there has already been taken.
The household half is a matter of how long supply holds. Millions of people are living under restrictions on water use now, in July and August, which is the part of the year when reservoir levels are supposed to be drawn down and then refilled. Restrictions imposed in the second consecutive drought summer are being imposed against a starting position that never fully recovered from the first.
Here is what the record does not contain, and the gaps are substantial. No reservoir-level figure appears in our sourcing. No crop-loss estimate, no compensation arrangement and no cost figure of any kind is attached to the early harvest. The seven declared areas are not individually enumerated in the source beyond the four named. No farmer, resident or agency official is quoted by name; the statement quoted above is institutional.
The distinction worth keeping hold of is that the Met Office measures and the Environment Agency decides. One published a rainfall total that beat a record set before the First World War. The other converted that, plus river and reservoir conditions it has not published in our sourcing, into a legal designation covering 51.4 percent of the country. The second act is the one that changes what people are permitted to do, and it will outlast the weather that prompted it.
