Drip Irrigation on a Timer: What the Hosepipe Rules Actually Say

This is the article in this series that people arrive at from a search box, usually phrased as some version of can I use drip irrigation during a hosepipe ban. The short answers circulating online are mostly wrong, and getting it wrong is not free: a Temporary Use Ban is enforceable in law, and breaching one is an offence carrying a fine of up to £1,000 on summary conviction.

So this one is worth reading properly rather than skimming.

Please treat what follows as a guide to reading your own supplier's notice, not as legal advice or as permission. The restrictions are set company by company, they are written documents with precise wording, and they change as reservoir and groundwater conditions change. The only authority on what you may do is the current notice published by the company that supplies your water.

Start here: the answer that is true everywhere

A drip system fed from a water butt is not affected by a hosepipe ban.

Not "probably fine", not "a grey area" — it is outside the restrictions entirely, in every company's notice, because the restrictions apply to water supplied through the mains. Rainwater you have collected is not mains water. Every notice we checked says so directly. Cambridge Water puts it about as plainly as it can be put: irrigation systems may be used when connected to a grey water or rainwater recycling system, that is, when not attached to the mains.

This is the reason the first article in this series was about water butts. A butt, a stand tall enough to give you some head of pressure, and a gravity-fed drip line is a system you can run without needing to read a single legal notice, without checking who supplies your water, and without any risk of getting it wrong. It is also cheaper to run and better for the plants.

If you want a drip system this summer and you want to stop thinking about it, that is the version to build.

Now the mains-fed version, which is more complicated

Here is the part that trips people up, and it is a genuine trap rather than a technicality.

Under a Temporary Use Ban, a dripper hose is a hosepipe. That is the default position, and it is written into the notices explicitly. Thames Water's statutory notice defines a hosepipe as "anything designed, adapted or used to serve the same purpose as a hosepipe", and states that the prohibitions apply "whether or not any device is attached to the hosepipe, such as a sprinkler, dripper hose, automatic irrigation systems or similar devices". South East Water says the same thing in different words: sprinklers and irrigation systems connected to the mains are all considered to be hosepipes.

So the starting point is that your mains-fed irrigation system is banned.

Separately, and additionally, the notices grant a specific exemption for a particular kind of system. It is not a loophole and it is not a general permission for "drip irrigation" as a category. It is a specification, and a system either meets all of it or it does not qualify.

The specification, criterion by criterion

Thames Water's statutory notice sets it out in full, and the wording is close to identical across several companies. The exempted system must be:

1. A drip or trickle irrigation system. Not a soaker or seep hose that weeps along its whole length, not a micro-sprinkler, not a spray head. Drip or trickle.
2. Fitted with a pressure-reducing valve. This is a real component that has to be fitted. A system running at mains pressure without one does not qualify, however small the emitters are.
3. Fitted with a timer. Again, an actual fitted component. Standing there with your phone is not a timer.
4. Not handheld. The system is laid out and left. The moment a person picks up the outlet and directs it, it is being used as a hosepipe and the exemption has gone.
5. Delivering water drip by drip directly onto the soil surface or beneath it. Onto soil, not onto foliage and not into the air.
6. Producing no surface run-off and no dispersion of water through the air by jet or mist. If it is pooling, running off, or misting, it does not qualify — regardless of what the box it came in said.

Read that list against an actual system rather than against the idea of one. In practice the two that catch people out are the pressure-reducing valve, which a lot of budget kits simply do not include, and the run-off criterion, which is a property of how you have laid the system out rather than of the equipment.

The other thing worth saying plainly: several companies use the phrase approved drip or trickle irrigation system. If you are in any doubt about whether yours qualifies, the companies all publish a contact route for exactly this question, and asking is free.

It is not worded identically everywhere

This is the reason the whole article carries a caveat rather than a conclusion.

We checked the current published notices of six companies with restrictions in force. All six permit some form of drip or trickle irrigation from the mains, but not on identical terms:

• Thames Water and South East Water publish the full six-part specification quoted above, and it is the strictest version.
• Anglian Water and South West Water require a drip or trickle system fitted with a timer and a pressure-reducing valve, delivering water directly to the soil.
• Southern Water requires a pressure-reducing valve and a timer, that it not be handheld, and that it apply water directly to soil without run-off or misting.
• Cambridge Water words it much more loosely — if it is a drip-fed system you can continue to use it; if it is not, it cannot be used on the mains.

Two conclusions follow. First, build to the strictest specification, because a system that satisfies Thames Water's wording satisfies all of the others, and you then do not have to care whose notice applies to you. Second, do not take a summary — including this one — as a substitute for the notice itself.

We were not able to verify the current position for every water company in England and Wales. If your supplier is not in the list above, we have not checked it, and you should not assume it matches.

Check your own supplier, today

Restriction status changes with reservoir levels and groundwater conditions. Bans get introduced, extended, varied and lifted, and the terms can be varied by a further notice after representations. Something that was accurate in August will not necessarily be accurate in October.

Two things to do:

1. Find out who supplies your water. It is on your bill, and it is not always who you would guess — supply areas do not follow county boundaries, and in some places one company supplies the water and another handles the sewerage.
2. Read their current notice, not a news article about it. The companies publish the statutory notice and a plain-English restrictions page. Those are the documents that count. If in doubt, contact them and ask about your specific system.

The primary sources for the companies referenced above:

• Thames Water — legal notice and hosepipe ban FAQs
• Anglian Water — restrictions and exceptions
• Southern Water — hosepipe ban exemptions
• South East Water — Temporary Use Ban
• South West Water — exceptions to the hosepipe ban
• Cambridge Water — temporary hosepipe ban FAQs

The underlying law is section 76 of the Water Industry Act 1991, together with the Water Use (Temporary Bans) Order 2010, which sets out the list of uses a company may prohibit.

What we would actually build

If it were our garden, and setting the legal question aside for a moment, the butt-fed system wins on the merits anyway.

Rainwater is better for plants than treated mains water, particularly for anything ericaceous. Gravity pressure from a raised butt is gentle enough that run-off is a non-issue. Running costs are nil. And the system does not become a problem the moment restrictions tighten, which — given how the last few summers have gone — is worth something on its own.

Put the butts in first, raise them as high as you sensibly can, run the drip line off the tap, and you have a system that waters the garden slowly and deeply while you are at work, and that nobody can tell you to switch off.

The only thing it will not do is water the lawn. Let the lawn go brown. It will be fine.