we here in East Sussex are supposed to have a hose pipe ban in a few days time
I was thinking to use the pressure washer to clean the cars about connecting the water butt to the pressure washer via a hose. If I did that how long I wonder would it be before some smart arse would report me
Is it important for the cars to be washed in times of water shortage? 
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You must have a big Butt! … if it contains enough litres of water to wash a couple of cars with a pressure washer?! 
We don’t have a hose pipe ban here yet but I haven’t given my car a full wash during this dry spell - I have used a bucket of water to wash off any acidic bird poop that gets deposited so as not to damage the paintwork - apart from that, the car can wait until water is more plentiful before I give it a full wash.
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Funny thing is that here in the land of droughts and flooding rains I don’t recall an actual hosepipe ban. There may have been in specific towns when they really did run out of water but not where I live
We have had restrictions such as only using the hose before 8 am and after 4 pm, must use a hose with an On/Off nozzle (they had to lower the water pressure for that one), bans on using a hose to wash down concrete and that type of thing but no actual outright ban.
Actually I also have 5000 litres of rainwater storage too, enough to wash a fleet of cars
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@realspeed Here in my part of West Sussex, my water supplier, Portsmouth Water has never imposed a hosepipe ban and I’m confident it will be the same all summer. Many in my area have a metered supply, so very few people waste water and that includes my household. I usually use Turtle Wax Snow Foam to wash cars as it reduces the amount of water needed for a good deep clean.
Why should anyone do that when it’s obvious that the ban is not on hosepipes as such but on using them to extract precious drinking water from the public network for inappropriate purposes in times of shortages? In your case you can lean back and relax.
Haha. That’s funny. 
We have a rhyne (drainage dyke) under our property meaning we have Riparian Rights (the right to abstract up to 20 cubic metres of water per day without a licence).
If I were to pump water out to irrigate my garden, I’m quite sure someone would try to report me.
… Meh.
I clean my car once a year whether it needs it or not.
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I have to say I feel differently about hosepipe bans when reading of the vast amounts of water wasted in water company leaks that are never fixed ir raw sewage being pumped into our beautiful coastline.
That must be a recent right, if it were a ancient one, no commoner would report you for extracting 706 cubic feet!!!
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No, not recent at all. Common law riparian rights have been around since at least the sixteenth century, but there have always been Ts and Cs surrounding them. Stream/river bed ownership, fishing rights over the water itself, whether the watercourse is on your land or your land abuts the watercourse all have different rules surrounding them.
Generally, anyone who has a watercourse on or bordering their land has riparian rights. There are some things you can do without a licence, such as abstract water for private or agricultural irrigation, but many rights can only be exercised with a licence, for example, interrupting the flow.
For example, I can pump out water and pour it on the ground, but I can’t put a water turbine in without not only a licence from the relevant water authority, but also planning consent from the council.
That’s £2 Grand, “kerching” before I can start to save the planet.