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United Utilities has no hosepipe ban and no restriction of any kind recorded. You can use a hosepipe and a sprinkler as normal. The United Utilities supply area across the North West: Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside. United Utilities supplies 7 million people.
Basis for this status, re-read 4 August 2026 on unitedutilities.com itself: the homepage carries a 'Save Water, Save Money this summer' efficiency campaign and no Temporary Use Ban notice of any kind, and its /hosepipe-ban and reservoir-level paths 404, which is not something a company with a live restriction does. A general efficiency campaign is NOT a drought appeal, so this stays no_restrictions. The 15 July 2026 statement, 'There are no plans for any restrictions in the north west', reached us via news coverage rather than its own site and is recorded as sourceDate. The 5 August 2026 claim a third-party tracker briefly reported, and corrected on 24 July 2026, must never be reinstated.
No hosepipe ban applies. You can use a hosepipe and sprinkler as normal.
We are an unofficial tracker, so United Utilities’s own notice is the version that legally applies to you.
United Utilities supplies 7 million people across the North West: Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside. It is a water and sewerage company across almost all of that footprint, which makes this one of the few large supply areas where the answer does not depend on separating your water supplier from your sewerage supplier. If you are in the North West, this is almost certainly your water company.
The company draws more than 90 per cent of its supply from rivers and reservoirs on average, operating over 100 water supply reservoirs alongside river and stream intakes, lake abstractions and groundwater sources. A surface-water system of that size responds to rainfall within weeks rather than seasons, which is why its position can change faster in either direction than a groundwater company's.
Source: United Utilities
United Utilities publishes reservoir levels weekly, dated to the week ending on a Sunday, which is an unusually good freshness signal from a company website. Its statement of 15 July 2026 was that there were no plans for any restrictions in the North West and that reservoir levels were above average for the time of year.
What would move it is set out in its Drought Plan 2027, published in March 2026, which restructures its drought level bands so that reservoir emergency storage now sits within level 3 alongside extreme drought measures rather than at level 4. The company also states an aim of halving the chance of a hosepipe restriction in future.
Source: United Utilities
A Temporary Use Ban restricts a narrower set of things than most people expect, and it is worth knowing which before one is ever declared. Section 76(2) of the Water Industry Act 1991 lists eleven uses, starting with watering a garden, cleaning a private motor vehicle, watering plants on domestic or other non-commercial premises, cleaning a private leisure boat and running through pools, ponds, fountains, walls, windows, paths and patios.
A watering can, a bucket and water you have collected yourself are never restricted by a Temporary Use Ban. Indoor use is never restricted, and neither is non-mains water. United Utilities would publish its own concessions on top of that list, and those are where the practical answers live: turf, drip irrigation, Blue Badge and trade use are handled company by company.
More: what you can still do, newly laid turf, drip irrigation, business and trade rules.
If a Temporary Use Ban were in force here, breaching it would be a criminal offence. The maximum is level 3 on the standard scale, currently £1,000, under section 76(5) of the Water Industry Act 1991. It is not a fixed penalty: United Utilities cannot issue one and would have to prosecute. In practice companies publish an enforcement policy that starts with a warning, so a first breach realistically produces a letter.
The notable event of this season in the North West was not a restriction but a false report of one. A third-party tracker stated that United Utilities had declared a Temporary Use Ban effective 5 August 2026, then corrected it on 24 July 2026 after the company confirmed it was wrong. Had that value been published here it would have emailed a ban-starts alert to every North West subscriber, which is why a status here can only be asserted from a company's own domain or a regulator.
Source: United Utilities
No. United Utilities has no hosepipe ban and no restriction of any kind in force.
It could. A company can impose a Temporary Use Ban under section 76 of the Water Industry Act 1991 without the regulator's permission, so this can change within days. For United Utilities it turns on its own drought plan.
Yes, both. No Temporary Use Ban applies in the United Utilities area, so hosepipes, sprinklers and pressure washers are all allowed.
Up to 1,000 pounds, imposed by a magistrates' court on conviction under section 76 of the Water Industry Act 1991. It is not a fixed penalty: United Utilities would have to prosecute, and starts with a warning.
Usually, but not automatically everywhere. Most companies exempt Priority Services Register customers and Blue Badge holders who cannot reasonably use a can or bucket, some automatically and some on registration. United Utilities's own notice sets the wording.
Your water bill, on the water supply line rather than the sewerage line: in much of England and Wales those are two different companies. United Utilities supplies the united utilities supply area across the north west: cumbria, lancashire, greater manchester, cheshire and merseyside.
No. That claim came from a third-party tracker, which corrected it on 24 July 2026 after United Utilities confirmed it was incorrect. Its own site published no such notice.
United Utilities publishes reservoir levels on its own website, updated weekly and dated to the week ending, always a Sunday.
The supply area runs from the Scottish border through Cumbria and Lancashire into Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire, bordering Yorkshire Water to the east and Severn Trent and Hafren Dyfrdwy to the south.
15 outward postcode districts resolve to United Utilities here, as primary supplier or as one candidate among several. An outward code is the part before the space: SO14, not SO14 3AB.
Town pages here: Manchester, Liverpool. Each resolves from its own outcode rather than this company's headline status, which matters most where a town sits outside a restriction its supplier has declared.
Source: United Utilities
United Utilities publishes water quality data openly but does not include a hardness determinand in any edition. We have asked them for it in writing.
United Utilities does publish it elsewhere: a water hardness factsheet with a full band table and a postcode water quality checker. Those figures are the company’s own, not ours, and they are not in the table above because they are not published in a machine-readable form.
Source of record: United Utilities’s own status page, last checked 16 September 2026; the company's page is dated 15 July 2026. We do not publish a hosepipe ban on the strength of a news report; every status rests on a primary source.