The UK drought of 2026 should be viewed as more than a difficult summer. For facilities teams, it is a warning about how water management may need to change as hotter, drier periods place greater pressure on buildings and the infrastructure that serves them.
By late August 2026, 71% of England by land area remained in drought, while around 30 million people were subject to water-use restrictions. Reservoir storage was also well below the seasonal average. The speed at which conditions deteriorated is particularly important. As recently as February, no Environment Agency areas were officially in drought or prolonged dry weather. By August, most of England was experiencing what the Environment Agency described as a ‘flash drought’.
While that does not mean drought will necessarily become an annual event in the UK, it does mean facilities managers should start planning for the possibility that water scarcity, restrictions and periods of unusually high demand will become much more regular operational considerations.
What does the 2026 drought tell us about future drought management?
The first lesson from this year is how quickly water conditions can change.
During 2025, several parts of England were already experiencing drought. Conditions improved through the winter and by late February 2026 the country had moved out of official drought and into prolonged dry weather status. Yet, only months later, drought had returned across much of England.
For facilities management, that short turnaround matters. If drought planning only begins once restrictions are announced, there may be very little time to understand consumption, locate unnecessary water use or decide which building services need to be prioritised.
The longer-term outlook reinforces the point. The Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources estimates that, without further action, public water supply could face a deficit approaching five billion litres per day by 2055. Climate change, population growth and environmental requirements are all increasing pressure on available supplies. The framework also anticipates hotter, drier summers alongside changes in when rainfall occurs.
“The lesson from this summer is that water can no longer be viewed as an unlimited building utility. Facilities teams need the visibility to understand how much they are using, where it is going and what they could change if supply comes under pressure,” explains Tony Williams, Managing Director, Cube Controls.
In practical terms, future drought management needs to begin before the next extended dry period arrives.
Water management needs to become a building-performance issue
That change starts with how facilities teams think about water.
Energy management has become embedded within the operation of many commercial buildings. Electricity and gas consumption are monitored, trends are reviewed and building controls are adjusted to reduce unnecessary demand.
Water is often managed differently. A monthly bill may be checked for cost or overall usage, but facilities teams may have limited information about where that water was consumed or whether demand was necessary.
That approach becomes increasingly risky when water availability is less predictable.
Commercial buildings rely on water for washrooms, catering, cleaning and drinking water. A serious supply interruption is therefore not simply a utility problem. It can become an occupant welfare, business continuity and building-performance problem.
Facilities teams should start treating water efficiency in the same way as energy efficiency: measure performance, establish what normal looks like, identify waste and intervene where operation can be improved.
The principles are closely related to those used in effective building automation and control systems. Good control begins with understanding what is happening inside the building.
Water may also support some mechanical building services, although significant water consumption for cooling is less common in modern commercial buildings than it once was.
Most conventional HVAC systems use water within closed circuits, where it transfers heating or cooling around the building rather than being continuously consumed. These systems should normally require only limited make-up water unless there is a leak, maintenance activity or another fault.
The position is different in very large buildings and facilities such as data centres that use cooling towers. These systems can use evaporative cooling to reject heat and therefore consume water through evaporation, as well as through processes used to maintain water quality. In these buildings, cooling can represent a much more significant part of overall water demand.
Start futureproofing with better water monitoring
Once water becomes a performance issue, the first practical requirement is visibility.
A building’s total annual consumption is useful, but it is not enough for active water management. Facilities teams need to understand when water is being used and, in larger or more complex buildings, which areas and systems are responsible.
A useful starting point is to establish:
- typical occupied and unoccupied consumption;
- daily and weekly demand patterns;
- which areas or services consume significant quantities of water;
- whether consumption continues unexpectedly overnight;
- where additional sub-metering could improve visibility; and
- what level of variation should trigger an investigation.
This baseline gives FM teams something against which abnormal consumption can be identified.
Consider an office building that appears to have reasonable overall water consumption. Trend information then shows a steady flow continuing between midnight and 5am, when the building should be largely inactive. That could indicate a leak, a faulty toilet cistern, an unnecessary cleaning process or a mechanical system using make-up water unexpectedly.
Without monitoring, that consumption can remain hidden until the next bill. With useful building data, it becomes something the facilities team can investigate immediately.
Building controls can help turn water data into action
Monitoring alone, however, does not make a building more resilient.
The real value comes from using information to identify problems earlier and support an appropriate response.
Where suitable meters, sensors and equipment can be connected to the building controls infrastructure, water information can potentially sit alongside data from HVAC and other building services. Trends can then help operators identify unusual patterns, while alarms can draw attention to conditions that move outside agreed parameters.
Depending on the building and installed equipment, this could help an FM team identify abnormal demand, investigate excessive out-of-hours consumption or detect unexpected make-up water within a closed-loop HVAC system. In larger facilities using cooling towers, it may also help operators understand water demand associated with evaporative cooling and how this changes with operating conditions.
A Building Management System cannot prevent drought or create additional water supply. Its role is to give operators better information and greater control over the services that can be managed.
“A BMS is most useful when it helps people act on what their building is telling them. With water, that means making unusual consumption easier to spot and bringing it into the same operational picture as energy, HVAC and the other services the facilities team already manages,” says Tony Williams.
Cube Controls designs, installs and modifies bespoke Building Management Systems, with the ability to work with existing and hybrid systems. That is important because improving water visibility does not necessarily mean replacing an otherwise effective controls platform.
Water, energy and HVAC need to be considered together
Better visibility also helps prevent water management becoming another isolated FM task.
Water, HVAC performance and energy use can be connected, but the relationship varies considerably between buildings.
In many modern commercial properties, heating and chilled-water circuits are closed systems. The water is circulated around the system rather than continuously consumed, so normal operation should not create significant water demand. Unexpected make-up water in these systems can instead be an indicator of leakage, loss of pressure or another condition that needs investigation.
Water consumption becomes much more significant where evaporative cooling is used. Cooling towers, for example, reject heat by evaporating water and are more likely to be found in very large commercial buildings, industrial facilities and data centres where substantial heat loads need to be managed.
During hot, dry weather, this distinction becomes particularly important. A facility with evaporative cooling may experience high cooling demand at exactly the same time that local water resources are under greatest pressure.
Facilities managers therefore need to understand the particular relationship between water and HVAC within their own building rather than assuming every cooling system has the same water requirements.
For example, a rise in make-up water on an otherwise closed system could indicate a fault that should be investigated. On a site with cooling towers, water consumption may instead rise legitimately with cooling demand, making accurate monitoring and optimisation increasingly important.
This whole-building approach already underpins the use of Building Management Systems to improve energy efficiency. Extending the same thinking to water can provide a more complete view of how effectively a property is operating.
Facilities teams reviewing their building control applications should therefore consider whether water-related data could provide useful additional insight alongside HVAC and energy information.
What should facilities teams do before the next drought?
The strongest response to 2026 is not another emergency checklist. It is to make drought resilience part of normal facilities planning.
FM teams do not need to predict whether next summer will bring another drought. They need to make sure their buildings are better prepared if it does.
Practical actions to consider now include:
- Establish a water baseline – understand normal consumption before trying to identify abnormal performance.
- Review existing metering – determine whether current meters provide enough detail to make useful operational decisions.
- Investigate out-of-hours use – water consumption when a building is empty can be an early indicator of waste or faults.
- Identify water-critical services – understand which building operations depend on a continuous water supply and what happens if that supply is disrupted.
- Understand your cooling strategy – establish whether HVAC uses closed-loop systems with minimal normal water consumption or water-intensive equipment such as cooling towers.
- Monitor HVAC make-up water – unexpected demand in a closed system can be a useful indicator that further investigation is required.
- Set useful alerts and thresholds – where the controls infrastructure allows it, use monitoring to highlight abnormal conditions rather than relying solely on manual checks.
- Plan for restrictions – know which activities could be reduced or changed if local water restrictions become more severe.
- Include water in future BMS projects – when controls are upgraded or modified, consider whether water monitoring should form part of the wider building-performance strategy.
This is also consistent with the wider direction of smart building technology – bringing useful building information together so operators can respond earlier and make better-informed decisions.
Water resilience should ultimately become part of the same continuous improvement process facilities teams already apply to comfort, energy and plant performance.
Future water management starts before the next dry summer
The UK drought of 2026 will eventually end, but the facilities management lesson should remain.
Water scarcity does not need to become an annual crisis before businesses start preparing for it. The combination of drought in 2025, renewed widespread drought in 2026 and longer-term pressure on England’s water resources makes a stronger case for preventative action now.
Good water management is not simply about using less water during restrictions. It means understanding normal building consumption, spotting waste earlier, improving operational control and knowing how the building will respond when supply is under pressure.
For many facilities teams, the most useful first question is straightforward: if another drought developed rapidly next summer, would you have enough information about your building to respond confidently?
Cube Controls works with facilities managers, building owners, consultants and contractors to design, modify, commission and optimise Building Management Systems. If your current controls provide limited visibility of building performance, talk to Cube Controls about how existing systems could be developed to support better monitoring, efficiency and long-term building resilience.
Preparing now will not remove future drought risk. It can, however, put facilities teams in a much stronger position to manage it.
