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.

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 wasn’t just something we asked our customers to do. Leakage was a big problem for every water company in the UK; where there were pipes, there were inevitably leaks. Cambridge Water was committed to finding and fixing leaks as quickly as possible. We were on track to reduce leaks by 15% by 2025, with new, even more ambitious targets to follow. We also made it easy to report leaks online – so if you spotted one, you could let us know and we would send out a team as soon as we could. And don’t forget, you took a water-saving pledge with Yes We Cam and we came to fix any leaky loos in your home for free!

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.