Heatwaves cost Britain over £4 billion this year while polluters laugh all the way to the bank
New research puts the cost of this summer's four heatwaves at £4.4 billion, with 2,700 dead and hospital scanners shutting down: nobody is asking the companies that caused the heat to chip in
This summer’s heatwaves cost the British economy £4.4 billion, according to analysis published by the think tank Verdant, which also found the toll rising to £25.6 billion by 2030 unless ministers act.
May cost £510 million. June, which broke UK temperature records, cost £2.36 billion. July cost £1.5 billion across two separate peaks. The losses are heaviest in London and the South East, with the City of London, Westminster and Tower Hamlets taking the largest local hits.
That is only the money. A joint analysis by Imperial College London, the Met Office and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated more than 2,700 people died from heat-related causes in England and Wales across the May and June heatwaves.
The hospital that nearly lost everything
Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth declared a critical incident on 24 June after chiller units failed, knocking out digital systems, operating theatres, cardiac catheter labs and scanning. The Norfolk and Norwich trust lost every working MRI scanner on its Norwich sites and cancelled more than 250 outpatient appointments. Elsewhere, machines used for cancer radiotherapy shut themselves down to avoid overheating.
One doctor described the moment the servers came close to going: “we thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights”.
There is no legal limit on how hot your workplace can get
Britain has no maximum working temperature. Employers must keep workplaces at a “reasonable” temperature and carry out a risk assessment. That is the whole of it.
So it falls to individual firms. Greggs shut 11 stores during the June heatwave because conditions inside were unsafe for staff. Transport for London bus drivers are set to strike over working conditions in extreme weather. Everyone else sweats it out.
If you are on zero hours, the heat comes straight out of your pay
Verdant is blunt about who absorbs this. Someone on a zero hours contract who cannot work in the heat simply loses the money. Someone on a standard contract does not.
Grantham Institute research at LSE found that in the week of June’s heatwave, 87 per cent of workers surveyed reported at least one heat-related health effect, from broken sleep to dizziness and a racing heart. Around 1.25 million people did not work at all that week.
The heat did not come from nowhere
Somebody profited from the pollution that caused these heat waves.
The companies that dug up and sold the fuel warming this country booked the money years ago. Shareholders took their cut. Executives took their bonuses. None of it appears on the balance sheet that matters now, which is the one showing £4.4 billion of lost British output, 2,700 dead, and a bus driver on strike because his cab hits 40 degrees.
Private profit. Public bill. That is the arrangement, and nobody was asked to agree to it.
Verdant proposes closing the gap. Its national heat insurance scheme, paying out to workers who cannot safely work, would be financed by an Extreme Weather Levy on the fossil fuel firms themselves. The people who made the mess would fund the solution.
The bill for fixing this is smaller than the bill for ignoring it
Verdant also wants a legal maximum working temperature, already law in Spain and Belgium and tabled in a Bill by Hannah Spencer MP, plus investment in cooling and greener urban spaces.
The Climate Change Committee has assessed how Britain is preparing. Progress is “either too slow, has stalled, or is heading in the wrong direction”. On heat, government action has been “not fit for purpose”.
Cooling investment would run at roughly £3.85 billion a year. Not doing it cost £4.4 billion this summer, and the bill lands on people who cannot afford to lose a shift.