Householders may be told to collect rainwater and recycle their dirty water, as suppliers continue to lose millions of litres to leaks every day.
The Department for the Environment is looking at ways to promote using “greywater” from sinks, showers, baths or washing machines, which can be used to flush toilets.
Options include updating building regulations to ensure newly built homes include recycling systems, in a bid to ensure households use no more than 105 litres per person per day.
Environment ministers are in talks with the Department for Levelling Up, which oversees housing, about the proposals.
The plan was backed by Tory Robert Goodwill, chairman of the Commons Environment Committee, who said that sewage plants could be overwhelmed in heavy rain.
He said: “We should do more to encourage homeowners to harvest greywater, which can buffer the effects of heavy rain.”
Other ideas under consideration include encouraging households to collect rainwater and introducing minimum product standards for toilets with tighter limits on the water they use.
Around a fifth of water running through pipes is lost to leaks, said regulator Ofwat. This amounts to 3,000 million litres every day, the equivalent of 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Water firms also want to increase household bills by up to 40 percent. They claim this is to pay for plugging leaks and cutting the amount of sewage dumped into rivers and coastlines.