How do you stop a dripping tap?
The short answer
Isolate the water to that tap, then replace the worn part. On a traditional tap with a handle you turn several times, that's a rubber washer. On a modern quarter-turn tap, it's a ceramic cartridge — and cartridges are tap-specific, so take the old one with you to buy the new one. A drip from around the spout base is usually an O-ring instead.
A drip is a worn seal, and it does not settle down. A tap dripping once a second wastes a surprising volume over a year, and on a metered supply you are paying for every drop of it.
Isolate first — ideally at the small isolation valve on the pipe under the basin, using a flat screwdriver to turn the slot a quarter turn. If there isn't one, it's the stopcock. Then plug the basin, because the tiny screw you are about to remove will otherwise find the plughole immediately.
The part depends on the tap. Old-style taps with a rising handle use a rubber washer, which is cheap and generic. Quarter-turn taps use a ceramic disc cartridge, which is neither — they vary by manufacturer, and the reliable way to get the right one is to take the old one to the merchants rather than guess online.
One local note, since it changes what you're looking for. In a hard-water town, a dripping tap is often a seal held open by limescale, and there's a whole industry of descaling advice built on that. Macclesfield's water is soft, so that's rarely what's happening here — a tap that drips in this town has almost always simply worn out its washer or cartridge, and it wants a new part rather than a clean.
It's a good beginner job on a basin tap. It's a less good one where the tap is buried behind a bath panel or the fittings are seized solid with age, at which point forcing it is how a dripping tap becomes a flooded bathroom.
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