This is a collection of extracts from both House of Commons and House of Lords Debates about the legal regulation of water resources in the UK during five key drought episodes, i.e. 1976, 1984, 1995, 2003-6 and 2010-12. The data extracts are coded with reference to core concepts developed during the Historic Droughts Project, i.e. Drivers, Impacts of and Responses to drought, with subsidiary coding of changes in the State of water resource management and Pressures contributing to the development of drought conditions. Where relevant the data is coded with reference to NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) regions in order to indicate with reference to which local or regional area Parliamentarians debate the management of water resources. The data set enables analysis of Parliamentarians’ perceptions of how the regulatory framework in the UK for water resources, and drought more specifically helps to alleviate periodic water shortages, but can also be limited in doing so. Historic Droughts was a four year (2014 – 2018), £1.5m project funded by the UK Research Councils, aiming to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of past drought episodes that have affected the United Kingdom (UK), with a view to developing improved tools for managing droughts in future. Drought and water scarcity (DWS) events are significant threats to livelihoods and wellbeing in many countries, including the United Kingdom (UK). Parts of the UK are already water-stressed and are facing a wide range of pressures, including an expanding population and intensifying exploitation of increasingly limited water resources. In addition, many regions may become significantly drier in future due to environmental changes, all of which implies major challenges to water resource management. However, DWS events are not simply natural hazards. There are also a range of socio-economic and regulatory factors that may influence the course of droughts, such as water consumption practices and abstraction licensing regimes. Consequently, if DWS events are to be better managed, there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the links between hydrometeorological and social systems during droughts. With this research gap in mind, the Historic Droughts project aimed to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of drought from a range of different perspectives. Based on an analysis of information from a wide range of sectors (hydrometeorological, environmental, agricultural, regulatory, social and cultural), the project characterised and quantified the history of drought and water scarcity events since the late 19th century. The Historic Droughts project involved eight institutions across the UK: the British Geological Survey the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Cranfield University, the University of Exeter, HR Wallingford, Lancaster University, the Met Office, and the University of Oxford.

Data were collected through a systematic search of digitised content of Hansard, the Official Report of debates in the UK Parliament. The data collection focused on Parliamentary debate during several major droughts, those during 1976, 1984, 1995, 2003-2006 and 2010-12. The search of the Hansard records was conducted with reference to a list of search terms that helped us to identify the relevant topics within every Parliamentary sitting. This list included the following terms: water, drought, water supply, Dennis Howell, heat wave, agriculture, environment, rain, fisheries, and rivers (e.g. the search terms helped us to identify the topic ‘Water Supply’, in the 22 July 1976 sitting of the House of Commons). In terms of temporal scope, we reviewed every sitting that took place between the spring or summer of every year in which one of the six key droughts listed above was experienced through to the winter or spring of the next calendar year (e.g. for the 1976 Drought, we reviewed every sitting between Spring 1976 and April 1977; for the 1995 Drought we reviewed every sitting between April 1995 and August 1996). Finally we read through the text of every selected debate, and used the definitions from the Conceptual Framework for the Historic Droughts project for identifying and coding excerpts from Parliamentary debate which referred to Drivers, Impacts of and Responses to drought, with subsidiary classifications of changes in the State of water resource management and Pressures contributing to drought conditions.