The Boring Rule That Makes Water Safe: What “Regulation 31” Reveals About Why Public Water Points Are Hard to Scale

People ask “is it safe” because safety is complicated

Public taps and fountains fail for a bunch of reasons, but one big reason is invisible:

Everything that touches drinking water has to be safe, tested, and approved.

The Drinking Water Inspectorate’s Regulation 31 regime exists to ensure products and substances used in public water supplies (like treatment chemicals and materials in contact with water) are assessed and approved.

This is not optional. It’s part of how the system protects health.

Why this matters for public hydration

When you add a water point, you are not just adding a “tap.”

You’re introducing:

• materials in contact with water
• maintenance risks
• contamination risks
• responsibility and liability
• ongoing monitoring

That’s why many places default to “we don’t offer it unless we have to.”

Regulation is necessary, but it slows expansion

Regulation 31 is good. It prevents unsafe shortcuts.

But the more complex the compliance burden, the more public water access depends on:

• budgets
• maintenance culture
• staffing
• and whether an organisation wants the hassle

Freee Water sidesteps the bottleneck

Freee Water’s model is not “install fountains everywhere and pray.”

It’s “deliver hydration predictably, funded sustainably,” without requiring every host location to become a micro water-utility operator.

Public fountains can still exist. But Freee Water can scale faster precisely because it avoids the “infrastructure + compliance + maintenance” pile-up.

The trust angle

When you can point to strict safety standards in UK drinking water regulation, you can also explain why Freee Water insists on its own compliance and traceability.

Trust is built through:

• clarity
• consistency
• and showing your work