How we verify hosepipe ban status
Hosepipe Ban is an independent tracker of Temporary Use Bans across every UK water company. It is maintained by an editorial team to a fixed method, summarised below. We are not a water company or a regulator; your supplier’s own notice is the version that legally applies to you, and every status we publish links to that source.
A status is only ever asserted from a primary source
A ban, appeal or lift is published only when it appears on the water company's own domain or a regulator. Aggregators, trackers and news outlets are recorded as corroboration but never as the basis for a claim.
We verify against the live homepage banner, not a stale deep page
Deep temporary-use-ban pages are frequently blocked to automated checks and go out of date; the company's homepage banner carries the live status. Where a company blocks automation, a person confirms it by hand.
When we checked is recorded separately from when the company last dated its page
Every status carries both a verification date (when we last checked it) and, where known, the company's own source date. A page can read 'checked today' while the company's own content is weeks old, so we surface that gap rather than hide it.
A lift is a positive claim, never an inference
We only mark a ban lifted from a dated primary source that says so. We never infer a lift from silence, from a page no longer mentioning a ban, or from a status we could not confirm. Wrongly announcing a lift would tell people it is safe when it is not.
Unconfirmed is a real answer
If we cannot confirm a status from its primary source within the season's freshness window, we say so and point to the company. We never degrade an unconfirmed status into a reassuring 'no restrictions'.
Coverage is resolved at the postcode, not the company
Most bans cover only part of a company's supply area. We record which areas are included and excluded and resolve the answer at the postcode, so an excluded town reads as unaffected even while its supplier has a ban.
Machine-readable and open
The live status of every company is published as JSON at /api/status.json, with each company’s level, areas covered and excluded, verification date and source URL. Reuse it with attribution.