UK: Without government action on heat deaths in our homes, heat-related deaths will triple in the coming decades, warned its climate change advisors.
The alert comes amid the first UK Red Extreme Heat Alert, with potentially life-threatening record highs expected north of York near 40C. According to a recent survey, about 4.6 million homes have overheated, just in England.
But until this summer, no regulations governed overheating in new buildings.
“We have been telling the government for the past 10 years that we are not fully prepared for the warm weather we are seeing in the UK right now,” Baroness Brown, deputy chair of the Climate Change Committee, told the BBC.
“We need to address the overheating risk in people’s homes.”
The Climate Change Committee says more than half a million new homes in Britain have been held liable for overheating since the issue was first raised nearly a decade ago.
According to the UK’s Health Protection Agency, the heatwave caused an additional 2,000 deaths in 2020.
Most of the health risk is from the heat inside our homes, yet the government just passed a rule requiring testing of new construction homes in June this year. The country’s housing stock is showing a lack of regulation, says James Prestwich of the Chartered Institute of Housing, which represents housing professionals.
“We have designed buildings that no longer cope well with the rising temperatures we experience in the summer,” says Mr Prestwich.
He says the problem is particularly acute in newly constructed flats in city centres.
“We’ve seen buildings built with a lot of glass and not necessarily the best through airflow through corridors.”
The exact scale of the health risk in UK homes with overheating is challenging to assess. Heat stress exacerbates underlying conditions such as asthma, heart disease and mental illness. Heatstroke symptoms- confusion, cramps and fatigue can be challenging to differentiate from other medical conditions, including COVID-19.
As a result, heat is not always mentioned as a factor on death certificates, making it difficult for coroners and medical professionals to assess how much of a health hazard it poses.
