Coronavirus means even more people might die during a heatwave this summer

Britain is reeling from the mounting death toll from Covid-19 but hot weather this summer could make things even worse. So why has the government ignored a shocking new report that shows its alert system for heatwaves does not protect people who are most vulnerable?

An official review of the Heatwave Plan for England, which was published last month by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reveals that the “Heat-Health Watch” system sends out alerts based on temperature thresholds that are too high.

The Department of Health and Social Care has known about the report since it was finalised in November, including the finding that more than 90 per cent of deaths during heatwaves in England have been occurring outside the periods of alerts.

The failure by the government to act on the report’s conclusions could put thousands of additional lives at risk this summer.

More than 3,000 “excess deaths” in England have been linked to heatwave conditions over the past four summers, including 892 last year, according to analyses by Public Health England.

It also warned last month that those who are at greater risk from heat are also at greater risk of suffering from Covid-19, and those people may need to spend more time at home.

But no changes to temperature thresholds have been made, and the ‘Heat-Health Watch’ system, which is jointly operated by Public Health England and the Met Office, was activated at the start of last week as summer kicks in.

The alert thresholds for daytime temperatures vary around the country, from 28 degrees Celsius in the North East to 32 degrees in London.

However, a new report by the Policy Innovation and Evaluation Research Unit presents evidence that people start dying when the temperature reaches 24 degrees Celsius in London, and 23 degrees Celsius in the West Midlands.

The report states: “Given the relative infrequency of temperatures at which an alert is currently triggered, only a small fraction of heat-related deaths occur on alert days – less than 10 per cent in the case of London and the West Midlands, and a similar pattern is seen in all other regions also.”

There are five alert levels from 0 to 4. Level 0 occurs normally outside the summer months, and level 1 is the default between 1 June and 15 September. A level 2 alert is issued when there is a high chance that one or more temperature thresholds across the country will be exceeded within the next few days. The alert moves to level 3 when the thresholds have been exceeded, and level 4 is reached when a prolonged hot spell becomes severe.

Confusingly, these thresholds are different to those used by the Met Office for heatwaves, which vary between 25 and 28 degrees Celsius across the country.

We cannot ignore the link between people dying in heatwaves and a growing concern around climate change.

The Heatwave Plan for England was first published 16 years ago after more than 2,000 people in the UK, and about 70,000 across Europe, died during an extended period of high temperatures in August 2003.

Researchers have suggested that climate change made the heatwave twice as likely to occur.

The Met Office has calculated that the summer of 2018, tied with 1976, 2003 and 2006 as the warmest on record, was 30 times more probable because of climate change.

The highest daytime temperature in the UK of 38.7 degrees Celsius was recorded last summer at Cambridge Botanic Garden.

Last summer, the Committee on Climate Change told the government that little progress was being made on addressing the risks posed by rising temperatures.

The committee’s annual report to parliament called for better planning in health and social care, and the need to raise awareness of the risks of high indoor temperatures – not only in homes, but also in care homes and other care facilities.

It noted that “around 20 per cent of existing homes currently overheat even in cool summers”, and that “overheating risks are not adequately addressed in the current Building Regulations”.

The government’s response in October claimed that it was “taking forward initiatives to address these risks”.

There is an added urgency now with the global pandemic, as more people are stuck at home during increasingly hotter days. The information and the evidence are there; we need the government to act on it.

Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science