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Extreme Heat: Preparedness

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak, Sir Christopher; it is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship. Let me say a big thank you to the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) for highlighting this issue. Whether people like it or not, it has to be addressed. It is a key issue for many people. The temperature rises across the United Kingdom cannot be ignored either, and they set a trend. The experts tell us that we have to be prepared for that.

When we think of heat planning, we must think in bigger terms than—I am not being facetious, by the way—having enough ice lollies in the freezer. It is about the pressure of running the freezer, and about the additional fans and cooling systems, which are running in a nation that is better equipped to store heat and not let it escape, which suits us 90% of the time. There are also some practical things we have to address. I want to talk about two things, health and agriculture. I believe we must also highlight a blind spot in our national resilience planning: the unique, devastating vulnerability of rural, coastal and agricultural communities to heat stress events. I want to ground this debate in my own beautiful constituency of Strangford, which stretches across the Ards peninsula and mirrors many coastal communities across the United Kingdom.

In the Ards and North Down area, roughly 20% of our population is aged 65 or older, so, from a health point of view, thousands of those elderly constituents live in older traditional stone or poorly ventilated rural properties, which act as little storage heaters during a heatwave. In my office in Ards, when it is warm in the summer, it is like a sauna bath, and when it is cold in the winter, it is like a freezer. That is the nature of the building; the walls are about a foot and a half thick, and they were built for a purpose—to hold the roof up—but they were never built for ventilation or for heat. We have those buildings across the Ards peninsula, where I live. An isolated pensioner living in a village in the Ards peninsula cannot just pop out to an air-conditioned shopping centre or a cold public building, so there is a personal health concern as well.

Furthermore, our agricultural sector, the very backbone of the Strangford economy, faces unprecedented strain. Vegetable and crop farmers are already grappling with intense summer droughts and skyrocketing water demands to keep yields alive. Our livestock are also highly susceptible to heat stress, threatening food security and farmers’ livelihoods alike.

Our critical infrastructure is, I believe, also hanging by a thread. Just last month, I tabled a parliamentary question on the resilience of our electricity grid during extreme weather. When a heatwave strikes, transformers overheat and water treatment facilities face immense pressure. In a rural area such as Strangford, if a water pump or power line fails because of extreme heat, entire communities are left vulnerable and cut off from basic utilities. The impact is on not just one but multiple households.

Although environmental adaptation is heavily devolved, the strategic funding and macro-infrastructure backing must be an all-of-the-United-Kingdom effort. We cannot treat heatwaves as an occasional summer novelty. I love heat, but I am not sure that I like 40°C; I can probably just about take 30°C. We had our Twelfth of July parade yesterday, and it was a lovely sunny day and I really enjoyed it; it is nice to have that heat now and again, but maybe not at the constant level that we now have.

I ask the Minister what cross-departmental work has been done with the devolved Administrations to ensure that the UK Health Security Agency’s heat-health alerts and emergency response playbooks are seamlessly integrated into rural healthcare networks. We have the system in place and we need to make sure that healthcare centres—whether that means GPs, clinics or hospitals—and health workers and carers are all integrated and working better together.

It is my belief that we need specific capital funding to be made available to modernise rural electricity grids, so that they do not buckle under the twin pressures of winter storms and summer heatwaves, and to support our agrifood sector in transitioning to heat-resilient farming practices. Of course, those improvements all take planning and funding, but if the Government truly believe in the environmental concerns that are seeing green taxes levied on those who can least afford them, that funding must come to these industries at the same time.

In conclusion—ever mindful of your timescale of about five minutes each, Sir Christopher—we must act now to ensure that national heatwave preparedness protects every citizen, whether they live in the heart of London or in my constituency on the shores of Strangford lough, and to ensure that our farmers and our agrifood industry are prepared to deal with any continued periods of heat. If that is what is to be expected in the future—the Government tell us that that is the way things are going—we have to be able to respond to that, and I gently say that we need to be more prepared.

I look forward to the Minister’s response. I know that the Minister is always very keen to ensure that the regional Administrations and Westminster work together. My hope is that that will be exactly what we do.

3.4 pm