FAQ

Brought to you by Cambridge Water, Yes We Cam was a powerfully simple initiative. It’s about making one small change to your everyday water habits to save our local chalk streams and rivers.

By choosing just one easy water-saving pledge, you became a crucial part of our county’s biggest ever water-saving action, protecting and restoring Cambridgeshire’s precious chalk stream habitats for generations to come.
The campaign ran between July and December 2024.

There are only around 200 chalk streams in the world, and over a quarter are right here in East Anglia. These rare habitats, including the Cam, are home to a rich array of native plants and animals, including brown trout, water voles, kingfishers, otters and swans.

But these precious habitats, as unique as the Amazonian rainforest or Great Barrier Reef, are under threat.

Your drinking water – essentially all of the water you use at home, from your taps to toilets – is supplied by local aquifers. These are the same groundwater sources that supply our chalk streams and rivers. The more we all use, the greater the pressure on our aquifers and chalk streams. If we don’t take collective action, these beautiful English landscapes could be damaged and even lost forever.

As reported by the Environment Agency in 2021, climate change and modern water usage are combining to make Greater Cambridge ‘seriously water stressed’.

With thriving biotech, R&D and other industries, Cambridgeshire is one of the country’s fastest growing regions, as well as one of the driest. Climate change models predict temperatures hotter than the national average, while Met Office projections show record low rainfall of 1.9mm a day – less than anywhere else in the UK.

With less rain, hotter weather, a growing population and rising modern water usage, our local groundwater sources – which also feed our chalk streams and rivers – are under pressure like never before.

Yes! Your water-saving has absolutely already made a difference. Many, many people in Cambridgeshire – including among your friends, family, neighbours, and colleagues – took an easy water-saving pledge, and all those pledges added up to a huge daily water-saving total.

In 2023, we ran Can for the Cam – a campaign that asked Cambridgeshire residents to ditch their garden hose for a watering can. This resulted in a massive saving of 940,000 litres a day from July to September. That was the power of collective action, and why we could be so sure that your efforts would make a difference.

Every day last summer, we monitored how much water was used. We compared this with how much water was usually used at the same time of year, adjusting for relevant factors such as weather conditions.

This resulted in a massive saving of 250 million litres of water – that’s the equivalent of 3.2million bathtubs!

It was the same approach we used to evaluate the Can for the Cam initiative in 2023, which asked Cambridgeshire residents to ditch their garden hose for a watering can.

This is an important question. Saving water isn’t just something customers are asked to do. Leakage is a big problem for every water company in the UK; where there are pipes, there are inevitably leaks. Cambridge Water is committed to finding and fixing leaks as quickly as possible and is aiming to reduce leakage in the region by more than 15% by 2030. They are also investing in new pipes in the network, which will help further reduce the number of leaks experienced.

Leaks can be reported easily, and by doing so, you help their teams resolve them quicker. If you spot one, get in touch with Cambridge Water by reporting a leak online.

1 in 8 toilets has a hidden leak down the back of the pan, losing up to 400 litres a day and potentially doubling your water bill.

Visit this link to find out more about leaks in your home.