FEATURE


UNDER PRESSURE


The summer of 2026 has left water at the centre of national conversation. For facilities managers, washrooms are where the pressure and the opportunities are most acute, as an upgrade at Canary Wharf shows, says Richard Braid, Managing Director at Cistermiser.


Summer 2026 will be remembered as one of the hottest and driest in living memory. It was a season that left its mark: at its peak, amber heat health alerts covered most of England, with temperatures reaching the high 30s. Large parts of England moved into what the Environment Agency called 'flash drought' after the driest July on record, 45 million people found themselves living in drought-stricken areas and at one stage 27 million customers were under hosepipe bans.


For facilities managers, this is not simply a story about the weather. It's a direct call to consider what's happening inside buildings, in spaces most people barely think about: washrooms.


An old assumption, a new reality There is a persistent belief in this country that water is one thing we're never short of. It rains, the rivers run, the taps work. But an ageing network, a growing population and increasingly extreme summers mean the system is under real strain. Government modelling suggests England faces a daily shortfall of around five billion litres by 2055 without significant intervention. The Government's White Paper, A New Vision for Water, sets out targets to cut water entering public supply by 20% by 2038, reduce per capita consumption from around 136.5 litres a day to 122


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litres by 2038 and 110 by 2050, and bring business water use down by 9% by 2038 and 15% by 2050.


These targets will be met, or missed, by decisions made inside buildings – and washrooms are one of the biggest opportunities for change.


The invisible waste Smart meter data is starting to show just how much water waste is hiding in plain sight. Thames Water's analysis suggests that roughly a quarter of water delivered to non-domestic buildings runs as ‘continuous flow’ – a litre or more an hour, every hour, for at least 14 days straight. Some of that is genuine demand. A lot of it is timed urinal cisterns flushing every 20 minutes regardless of whether anyone has used the washroom, toilets leaking quietly behind the pan and taps left running longer than they need to be. It’s rarely obvious where the waste occurs unless someone goes looking.


Canary Wharf: A case in point Canary Wharf Retail is a good example of what active looking can achieve. The washroom facilities serving Cabot Place Mall, which sees up to 120,000 visitors a month, were still running on cistern technology installed when the retail complex was built around two decades


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