UK Extreme Heat

Question

11:39:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to prepare for, and mitigate, the increasing likelihood of prolonged periods of extreme heat in the United Kingdom.

My Lords, this Government are taking action to strengthen the UK’s resilience, including against environmental threats such as the recent heatwave. The national risk register details the wide-ranging impacts of extreme heat to ensure that comprehensive contingency plans are in place. In response to the heatwave last week, the Cabinet Office convened the summer resilience network to ensure that departments were alert to the impending weather and were satisfied that the sectors they represent had effective plans in place. While I am here, I want to put on record our thanks to all the professionals working to keep us safe during extreme weather periods, from the LRFs to agencies including the Met Office, the Environment Agency and government departments.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Answer. Prolonged extreme heat is now 100 times more likely because of climate change, a new Met Office report has found. Inescapable heat is a silent mass human killer. Our systems and infrastructure are not prepared. The recent adaptation report found that many of our plans could not even be evaluated. Will the Minister initiate better communications with our climate scientists, put heat resilience at the heart of policy with a Cabinet position and offer better climate services and advice to society and industry?

My Lords, the Cabinet Office works very closely with experts in the Met Office and the UK Health Security Agency to plan for and respond to extreme heat events well in advance of the summer months. Their advice is central to communicating the risk of extreme heat to the public. We understand how extreme heat affects all of society. This is why our preparedness, as part of the national risk register, focuses on the potential impacts of heat across sectors such as health, transport, water supply and vulnerable groups. To reassure the noble Earl, COBRA speaks to our climate scientists daily. This morning’s 8 am call focused on our immediate challenges related to extreme heat at the end of this week and the beginning of next week. All this work is overseen at the Cabinet Office by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

My Lords, I do not know whether my noble friend the Minister has had a chance to read the report by the Physiological Society entitled Red Alert: Developing a Human-centred National Heat Resilience Strategy. As the House may appreciate, there is growing scientific interest in the effect of heat on human beings, which makes this Question so well timed. The report recommends that the Cabinet Office lead a task force, so my original question was going to be about whether that is happening. But, in the light of the earlier Answer, am I right in thinking that there is now a proper task force established in the Cabinet Office to tackle these issues government-wide?

I hate to disappoint my noble friend by saying that I have not read the report he references, but I will make sure I get a copy this afternoon—it is my birthday this weekend, so that will give me something to do. I referenced the summer resilience network, which is convened by COBRA as a cross-government network that brings together all relevant agencies and our devolved Governments to make sure that we are ready. With regard to this period of extreme heat, the first guidance was issued before Easter to make sure that local resilience forums were getting ready. The Cabinet Office takes this extraordinarily seriously and it will be part of our resilience strategy, which we will publish soon. As we are about to discuss the national security strategy, I reassure noble Lords that climate change and its impact as a security feature are referenced 12 times. This is something that the Government take seriously.

My Lords, I wish the noble Baroness a very happy birthday at the weekend. We should not take climate change in any way lightly nor, indeed, the rise in heat, but I think we should also remember that, during those wicked days of Empire, we all went to India and Africa and people managed to survive—and they still survive in India and Africa and places—so I do not think we should take this overseriously. Does the Minister agree that we should just take sensible precautions?

I think that is the most House of Lords question I have had so far. I think we need to remember what happened in 2022 when we had extreme heat in the UK. That was the first time ever that 40 degrees heat was registered in the UK—registered at RAF Coningsby—and there were nearly 3,000 excess deaths, 20,000 hectares were burnt, 14 major incidents were declared and 4 million birds died in 48 hours. The impact of heat in the UK is something we are going to have to deal with. The noble Lord makes an important point about heat overseas. We also have to make sure that British nationals have support when they travel, which is why we have issued guidance only this week about excessive heat in Spain, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. We need to make sure that people look after themselves when they travel, wherever they are.

My Lords, many other countries have the advantage of a maximum working temperature in statute. That has the advantage of being simple and easily understood by workers and employers, especially small employers. Will my noble friend the Minister consider asking colleagues to commission the Health and Safety Executive to conduct a fresh review of the evidence and assess whether it is time for a maximum working temperature in the UK?

I thank my noble friend. As a former trade union officer, this is something that I have discussed every summer in my adult life. My noble friend is aware of the current situation with regard to the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations, which require employers to provide a reasonable indoor temperature in the workplace. Obviously, what is reasonable depends on what work you are doing and where you work, which is why in the Moses Room yesterday we had to have the doors open and the fans on. I think it is appropriate that appropriate mitigations are made, but my noble friend will be aware that these conversations are ongoing, and the very nature of this Question ensures that I had yet another conversation about it yesterday.

I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet. Should we not be aware, in discussing this Question, that extreme heat affects us in certain ways, but extreme heat overseas can have devastating effects on crops, with drought, famine and population changes and movements, so we should not treat this lightly? Alongside the need for mitigation, resilience measures and everything that the Minister has said, is not the proof of the increased likelihood of these sorts of episodes an absolute clarion call for this country not to withdraw or retreat from our commitment to domestic progress and international leadership on fighting further climate change?

The noble Baroness raises excellent points about why we are having to have these conversations in the first place. It is clear that the chance of 40-degree days in the UK is now 20 times higher than it was in the 1960s, and we have a 50:50 chance of a 40-degree day within the next 12 years. This is changing within the UK, and obviously that has a knock-on effect on climate elsewhere, which is why we need to take this extremely seriously in terms of our impact on the environment and why I was so pleased to see in our industrial strategy, which we published on Monday as part of our plan for change, that we made commitments to green jobs, investment in green energy, embedding net zero and challenges to climate change within our plans for government across every department.

My Lords, I, too, wish the Minister a very happy birthday for the weekend and hope she enjoys her cheerful reading time. During a recent debate in Grand Committee on wildfires, the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley, recognised the problem the Government have with accurate data collection on wildfires and referred to “the introduction of the new fire and rescue data platform—a new incident reporting tool used by fire and rescue services”.—[Official Report, 12/6/25; col. GC 321.] Given the higher risk of wildfires during prolonged periods of hot weather, can the Minister commit that the Government will move quickly on this and confirm when this new platform will be up and running?

I thank the noble Baroness for the birthday wishes. It is wonderful to hear her cite my noble friend the Minister who is responsible for this. Obviously, MHCLG took responsibility for fire and rescue services only on 1 April, but we are very clear that we will be bringing forward the tool and the wildfire strategy imminently, and I look forward to discussing it with her, undoubtedly at the Dispatch Box, in due course.

My Lords, heatwaves can significantly disrupt transport such as by causing rails to buckle overhead, wires to fail and roads to crack, so what specific investment are the Government making to ensure that transport infrastructure is fit for extreme weather?

As many of us will be using trains this weekend, this is a key question, especially because I alert all noble Lords to the fact that an amber heat alert has now been issued for this weekend, so people should be careful. The April 2025 Climate Change Committee adaptation progress report rated the policies and plans of the rail and strategic road network as “Good”. DfT’s upcoming adaptation strategy will address the recommendations to empower the sector to take further action. On the specifics of rail, Network Rail is mindful that extreme heat events such as those we saw in 2022 are difficult to predict but it needs to invest for them, so it is investing in hazard forecasting and in revising its engineering and maintenance standards to keep the railway ready for such events so far as is reasonably practicable. With regard to recognising that passengers will also experience extreme heat in stations and on trains, not just through line disruptions, DfT has tasked the 14 contracted train operating companies to each produce weather resilience and climate change adaptation strategies. Those are not due until January 2026, but that is a step to make sure that policies and procedures are in place. With that, everyone keep safe this weekend, my Lords.