Britain at the mercy of deadly heatwaves

MPS’ report warns homes, offices, schools and transport systems are ill-prepared

BRITAIN is ill-prepared to cope with heatwaves, a major report by MPS has warned as the Met Office predicted that the UK may experience its hottest day on record tomorrow with temperatures possibly exceeding 101F (38.5C).

The Commons environmental audit committee said that adapting to a warming climate was now “a matter of life and death” and without action, thousands of Britons would die each year. The committee said rules brought in to make modern homes and offices more energy efficient had left householders and workers to swelter in overly insulated buildings with little ventilation. It called for updated guidelines.

The MPS’ report also said that road and rail services had not been built to cope with such hot weather, with just half of Britain’s motorways surfaced with material that can withstand high temperatures and rail tracks increasingly at risk of buckling.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned that people were “vomiting and passing out” from the heat and MPS said health guidance should be issued to employers and schools to relax dress and uniform codes and allow flexible working. A survey carried out by the committee also found schools were so hot in summer that nine in 10 teachers are forced to pay for fans to make classrooms bearable.

MPS warned that by the 2040s, Britain would face similar heatwaves every two years, and called for a minister to be appointed to tackle the growing crisis. Mary Creagh MP, who chairs the committee, said: “Heatwaves cause premature deaths from cardiac, kidney and respiratory disease. There will be 7,000 heat-related deaths every year in the UK by 2050 if government does not act.”

Meanwhile, the Met Office and Public Health England issued a level-3 heat health watch alert covering a large part of England, warning people to stay out of the sun and keep their homes cool.

Britain is just one stage away from a national emergency, which will be triggered if healthy people start becoming seriously ill – but visits to the NHS Choices website have already risen by 450per cent as people struggle with heat exhaustion and sunstroke.

Wendy Preston, the head of nursing at the RCN, said: “The heat is already affecting patients in health and social care settings ... our members report people vomiting and passing out, and it is clear the healthcare infrastructure is simply not designed to deal with increasingly hot summers. This summer is just a taste of what could be in store for the UK in the face of climate change, and the Government must act now.”

The Met Office said the heatwave would peak today and tomorrow with temperatures rising to 98F (37C) and beyond in the South East. The highest temperature ever recorded in Britain was 101F (38.5C) at Faversham, Kent, on Aug 10 2003, but forecasters said tomorrow could beat that record.

SUMMER temperatures in Britain could regularly hit 100F (38C) in about 20 years.

A new report by the Environmental Audit Committee has found that the UK is highly vulnerable to heatwaves and has recommended urgent changes.

On the job

Employees should be permitted to wear shorts and T-shirts to work or be allowed to stay at home when temperatures becomes too high.

The new report found workplaces are unprepared for heatwaves, putting the health of staff at risk and harming productivity and called on companies to draw up hot weather plans.

MPS say Public Health England should issue “formal guidance” allowing remote working and cooler clothing to be worn and want to bring in a maximum temperature for offices.

More than five million working days were lost when temperatures hit 78.8F (26C) in 2010, costing around £770million in lost output.

Likewise, the heatwave of 2003 cost up to £500million in lost manufacturing productivity.

Office blocks built in the Sixties and Seventies are particularly badly designed to deal with periods of intense heat because of poor ventilation systems, MPS warned.

Transport

Commuters will have to get used to melting roads and trains moving at snail’s pace unless significant transport infrastructure improvements are made, the report finds. As trains on some lines were reduced to 20mph yesterday, the committee warned passengers to expect disruption to become five times more frequent over the next 30 years.

During intense heat, the temperature of rails under direct sunlight can become 68F (20C) higher than the surrounding air temperature, making them vulnerable to buckling under trains moving at anything faster than a crawl. The report also warned that just half of Britain’s strategic road network is resistant to the heat, with the rest, coated in asphalt bituminous surfacing or concrete, vulnerable to melting.

Giving evidence to the committee, Transport for London said signal failures could become more frequent, leaving passengers trapped in tunnels in soaring temperatures.

Schools

Teachers are being forced to buy fans with their own money to battle sweltering classrooms and the slump in children’s concentration that goes with it, MPS found.

A survey of staff found 90 per cent were having to take matters into their own hands just to make their teaching environment “bearable”.

Of the 135 questioned in the survey, 52 per cent said they felt overheating schools were affecting pupils’ productivity.

The report also called on the Department for Education to issue guidance telling head teachers when it is appropriate to relax uniform rules, and to establish an agreed upper safe temperature.

Hospitals

Hospitals are particularly vulnerable to hot weather, with nearly 3,000 instances of overheating above 78.8F in 2016-17, the report found.

Patients were frequently suffering temperatures on the wards of more than 86F (30C), even when it was just 71.6F (22C) outside, MPS found.

Prof Rajat Gupta, who led a separate investigation, recently discovered care homes were also often too hot because of a perception that older people “feel the cold”.

Heat-related deaths are expected to treble to around 7,000 a year by 2050s without effective measures to reform processes and infrastructure, the committee believes.

There were 2,193 deaths as a result of the heatwave in 2003, and for every degree above 77F (25C), there are and extra 75 deaths per week.

On Tuesday, the Office for National Statistics said it believed there had already been 500 such deaths in the UK in the first two weeks of July.

At home

Changes in regulations to make buildings more efficient have left homeowners living in stuffy, airless boxes, MPS warned.

The Buildings and Regulations Act changed in 2006 to ensure that homes conserved more energy, while a Code for Sustainable Homes enacted the following year said all new homes built by public finance or on former public land must reduce energy output by 25 per cent.

In response, builders made homes increasingly airtight, which halved the amount of air flow circulating in buildings.

But MPS said regulations had failed to take into account that many people live in urban areas where they cannot open windows because of noise, pollution or security reasons.

Commenting on the report, Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said: “Many deaths could be prevented if people’s homes had better ventilation, and windows were fitted with shutters or blinds.”