Should you grass on a neighbour who breaks the hosepipe ban?

We know many water companies are themselves guilty of profligate waste through unrepaired leaks. So to snitch on a neighbour, who is making a comparatively tiny personal contribution to the drought, seems petty.

But we are only human and it is hard to watch your flowers and vegetables wither and die while your neighbour is still drenching his own produce with gay abandon.

If you have a smart water meter you might be more careful about over-use as Big Brother is watching you. Candy, a wife and mother of three in my nearby town, showed me her own bill for water use. It announced that her total water use was 93m³ between January and July 2022. The bill declared: ‘That’s the same as about 372,000 cups of tea, OR 1,240 showers OR 1,163 baths.’

‘So I would be wary of using a hose during this drought,’ Candy told me. ‘Because I feel the meter would catch me out.’

But those without smart meters often believe they are special cases. One profligate waterer still using a sprinkler system when I went to her garden for drinks last week said: ‘I thought we were short of vegetables in this country and anyway all my family prefer showers to baths so we can use that saved water to keep the vegetables alive.’

Another woman in Worcestershire argued: ‘Well I have chosen not to have children – so I think I am perfectly entitled to use as much water as I want.’

Yet every little helps, as the supermarket slogan goes, and if every individual would restrict their water use, then the sum of the saving would be greater than the whole of its parts.

But as a concept, ‘Every little helps’ is hard to drive home into resistant brains. Think of all the caravan park punters who refused to restrict their use of wet wipes. The owners begged people not to flush them down their toilets but each holiday-maker thought they were a special case – even though it had been explained that the parks were not on mains water. Once the owners began to spend more on drain engineers than they were taking from punters, they had to close the parks down.

When it comes to residential water wastrels, the digital age is bringing out the school sneak in too many of us. Go online and you can anonymously name and shame the offenders to your water company or the local authority, even supplying video evidence secretly filmed on your phone.

Much better to go quietly along to the profligate neighbour and hiss conspiratorially that you’ve heard there is a hosepipe enforcement officer doing the rounds locally. Then nod and wink supportively as they rush to turn off their sprinklers or stop filling their paddling pools.

And what if you have your own tip-off , i.e. you learn that some neighbour who you thought, after lockdown bonding, you were on good terms with, has taken it on themselves to dob you in? Rise above it and pretend it never happened.

A recent survey shows that Londoners are the least likely to grass on their neighbours while Scottish residents are the keenest. Could this be because city dwellers are less in touch with the land and less able to think through the consequences of proper drought?

Whatever the reason, my blanket rule is: do not snitch. And similarly don’t lay yourself open to being snitched upon. A lifelong feud with a neighbour is many times worse than a temporary drought.