Tim’s take:

The Met Office record tells a story the broadsheet headline never quite manages: Britain isn’t getting uniformly wetter, it’s getting wetter in the wrong places at the wrong times. For a working farmer that distinction matters more than any single drought or flood event, because drainage, drilling dates and silage windows are all pegged to seasonal expectations that the data is quietly rewriting.

What jumps out is the South East, where winter rainfall has climbed 13.7% against the long-term average while summer totals, contrary to the chat down the pub, are not actually falling. Add the 4.1mm June figure for England and Wales in 2025 — the driest in a series stretching back to 1836 — and you have a region taking on more water off-season and less when crops and grass most need it. Combine that with the second-lowest river flows from March to August since 1961, beaten only by 1976, and the reservoir and abstraction arguments in the South East stop looking theoretical.

If you farm anywhere south of the Midlands, my suggestion is to spend an evening with the Met Office’s HadUK-1990 regional grids before next winter, and pressure your local water company on whether its abstraction licences still reflect a climate where the wet comes in December rather than July.

UK rainfall by region, from the raw Met Office record: winter is up 13.7% in the dry South East, while summer totals are not actually falling.

In 2025 England had its driest spring in over 100 years. England and Wales recorded 4.1 mm of rain in June — six per cent of the average, the driest June in a series that goes back to 1836. River flows across England from March to August were the second lowest since 1961, beaten only by 1976.

That same year, Northern Ireland had its third-wettest autumn on record.

If you farm, you already know the headline “Britain is getting wetter” is not much use to you. The question is which part of the year is getting wetter, by how much, where — and whether the water arrives when you need it. So rather than repeat the summary, I downloaded the Met Office’s regional rainfall records and worked it out.

The answer is more specific, and more useful, than the version you usually read.

How far back the record actually goes

The England & Wales Precipitation series starts in 1766. It is the longest instrumental rainfall record in the world. The regional series — South East England, Central England, and so on — start in 1873, and the Scottish and Northern Irish series in 1931.

Almost every article on this subject leans on that 1766 date and says the record shows 250 years of wetter winters and drier summers. There is a problem with that.

A 2020 study in the International Journal of Climatology went back through the early gauges and found two serious biases. Early rain gauges had no protective rim and badly under-caught snow, which made old winters look drier than they were. And before 1820 the network was thin — sometimes a single station representing an entire region — with inconsistent gauge designs at key sites like Oxford and Kew, which made old summers look wetter than they were.

Correct for both, and the celebrated multi-century trend to wetter winters and drier summers largely disappears. The authors recommend using the raw series only from 1865 for winter and 1820 for summer.

This matters because it means the strongest evidence is not the 250-year story. It is the shorter, better-measured record — and that record still shows a clear signal. It is just a different signal from the one usually reported.

What the reliable record shows

I compared the most recent 30 years (1996–2025) against the 1961–1990 baseline the Met Office uses, splitting the year into the winter half (October to March) and the summer half (April to September). Every figure below was computed from the Met Office HadUKP regional series.

Winter rainfall is up everywhere in England and Wales.

• South East England — 771 mm a year; winter +13.7%, summer −0.5%
• North East England — 856 mm a year; winter +11.7%, summer +9.6%
• England & Wales — 983 mm a year; winter +10.8%, summer +4.2%
• North West England & Wales — 1,095 mm a year; winter +10.1%, summer +5.9%
• Scotland — 1,456 mm a year; winter +9.9%, summer +4.8%
• Central England — 683 mm a year; winter +9.1%, summer +4.2%
• East Scotland — 808 mm a year; winter +9.1%, summer +5.9%
• South West England & Wales — 1,093 mm a year; winter +9.0%, summer +3.7%
• Northern Ireland — 1,042 mm a year; winter +0.2%, summer +3.9%

Winter is October to March, summer is April to September, and the change is the 1996–2025 average against the 1961–1990 baseline.

Two things stand out.

The first is that the driest region is changing fastest. South East England — the driest part of the country at 771 mm a year — has seen the largest winter increase of any region at 13.7 per cent. The wet west, which you would expect to be getting wetter, is changing more slowly than the dry east.

The second is that Northern Ireland has barely changed at all in winter, at 0.2 per cent. The change is not uniform across the UK, and any national figure hides that.

The concentration of recent wet winters makes the point more sharply than the averages do. Of the ten wettest winter half-years in the England and Wales record since 1766, six have occurred since 2000: 2000/01, 2013/14, 2015/16, 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2023/24. The wettest of all was 2023/24.

The part everyone gets wrong

Here is where the standard version of this story breaks down.

Summer rainfall totals are not falling. Look at the figures again: every English and Welsh region except the South East shows summer rainfall slightly up on the 1961–90 baseline. And the driest summer half-years in the whole England and Wales record are not recent ones. They are 1870 (242.4 mm), 1921 (253.8 mm), 1995 (266.8 mm), 1959 (268.9 mm) and 1990 (273.8 mm).

Two of the five worst are Victorian. None is from the last thirty years.

So when you read that British summers are getting drier, treat it carefully. The rain that falls in summer has not meaningfully declined. What has changed is everything on the other side of the ledger: hotter summers mean more evaporation and more crop demand, so the same rainfall goes less far. And the projections say the rain that does fall will arrive in harder, shorter bursts.

That is a different problem from “less rain”, and it needs a different response. A farm planning for lower summer rainfall totals is planning for the wrong thing. A farm planning for the same rainfall arriving less usefully, against higher demand, is planning for what the data actually shows.

What to expect

The official projections are UKCP18. Under the high emissions scenario by 2070, they show summer rainfall falling by up to 47 per cent and winter precipitation rising by up to 35 per cent.

Both of those are the top end of the highest-emissions pathway, and they are routinely quoted without that qualification. Treat them as the upper bound of the plausible range, not a forecast.

The finding that matters most on the ground is this: even as summers trend drier overall, the intensity of individual summer downpours increases. Drier, harder ground. Harder rain. More runoff, less infiltration, more flash flooding — and more soil leaving your fields in the events that do occur.

The Met Office’s own summary of 2025 puts the current position plainly: recent droughts, driven by very hot dry summers, are consistent with projections toward more severe droughts as the climate warms. And alongside that, high river flows show a strong national increase, tracking the winter rainfall signal.

More water in winter. Not less in summer, but less useful. Both ends getting sharper.

Adapting to too much water in winter

The winter signal is the clearest thing in the whole dataset, and it is the one with the most practical response available.

Drainage is the first call, and it is not just a heavy-land issue. AHDB’s field drainage guidance is that heavy clays waterlog for long periods without drainage — no surprise — but also that medium-textured soils in high-rainfall areas need drainage to stop them slaking and compacting. If your ground is not classic heavy clay, that does not exempt you.

The organic matter point is the one worth acting on. AHDB notes that organic matter in arable soils has fallen over the past seventy years, and that this has made those soils more prone to waterlogging and more dependent on drainage. Read that carefully: part of the wetter-winter problem is not weather at all. It is a soil condition we created, which has reduced the buffer available to absorb the extra rain. That part is within your control in a way the rainfall is not.

Practically, that means the response to wetter winters runs in this order:

• Find out what your drainage is actually doing. AHDB is running drainage trials at Strategic Cereal Farm North on heavy clay in North Yorkshire, looking at how drainage upgrades change soil health, weed pressure and yield. Worth following before you commit capital.
• Build soil structure before buying kit. The goal is a structure that holds oxygen and water for roots while letting the excess away. Organic matter, rotation and traffic management do more per pound than most machinery.
• Protect the autumn window. The winter increase is concentrated in exactly the period that decides whether autumn drilling works. Establishment approaches that tolerate a compressed or wet window are now a risk-management decision, not a fashion.

Adapting to summer water that does not stretch far enough

This is where the pressure is right now, not in 2070.

As of late July 2026, the Environment Agency reported 1,327 hands-off flow restrictions in force on abstraction licences — up from 729 the previous week. Irrigation reservoirs were sitting at 30 to 50 per cent full where growers depend on stored water.

The EA and Defra’s drought guidance for agriculture sets out what to do about it:

• Fill on high flows, not on need. Be ready to abstract during high-flow events to maximise reservoir fill, rather than waiting until you want the water. Given the winter increase documented above, this is the single adaptation most directly supported by the rainfall data — the extra water is arriving in winter, so the storage question is whether you can catch it.
• Join or form a Water Abstractor Group. The NFU works with the Water for Food group to increase the number of these groups, and is developing a toolkit for setting one up. Existing groups such as the Broadlands and East Suffolk abstractor groups give members collective weight with the Environment Agency and access to grant funding.
• Trade water rights, or vary your licence. Both are available and under-used.
• Check your reservoir for leakage. Losses from poor integrity are the cheapest water you will ever recover.
• Shift cropping where the sums stop working. More drought-tolerant crops, or reduced irrigated area matched to realistic water availability.
• Look at the longer-term options. Local Resource Option Screening studies cover rainwater harvesting, high-flow abstraction, recycled water and Internal Drainage Board partnerships.

What this means for your farm

Strip it back to three things.

If you are in the drier east or south east, you are in the region changing fastest, and in both directions. Winter rainfall up nearly 14 per cent, summer flat while demand rises, and abstraction increasingly restricted when you need it. Winter storage capacity is the highest-value investment on the list, because your extra water is genuinely arriving — just in the wrong season.

If you are in the wet west or north, your winter increase is real but proportionally smaller, and your problem is trafficability and soil damage rather than supply. Drainage condition and organic matter are where the return is.

Everywhere, stop planning for less summer rain and start planning for less useful summer rain. The totals have held up. The value of them has not.

The rainfall record is one of the few genuinely long, genuinely good datasets British farming has. It says the water is still coming — increasingly in winter, and increasingly in a hurry. The farms that do well out of the next thirty years will be the ones that can catch it, hold it, and get their machinery across the field afterwards.

Frequently Asked Questions

How far back do reliable UK rainfall records go?

The England and Wales series starts in 1766 and is the longest instrumental rainfall record in the world, but a 2020 study found early gauges under-caught snow and the pre-1820 network was too thin to trust. The recommendation is to use the series from 1865 for winter and 1820 for summer. The regional series start in 1873, and the Scottish and Northern Irish series in 1931.

Which UK region has seen the biggest rainfall change?

South East England. Its winter half-year rainfall is up 13.7 per cent on the 1961–1990 baseline, the largest increase of any region — despite being the driest part of the country at 771 mm a year. The wet west is changing more slowly than the dry east.

Are British summers actually getting drier?

Summer rainfall totals are not meaningfully falling. The driest summer half-years in the England and Wales record are 1870, 1921, 1995, 1959 and 1990 — none from the last thirty years. What has changed is demand: hotter summers mean more evaporation, so the same rainfall goes less far, and it increasingly arrives in short intense bursts.

What should farmers do about wetter winters?

Check what your drainage is actually doing before spending on it, build soil organic matter to restore the buffer that absorbs extra rain, and protect the autumn drilling window. AHDB notes that falling organic matter in arable soils has made them more prone to waterlogging — that part is within your control in a way the rainfall is not.

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