Heatwave survival gap widens as social tenants barred from cooling grants

Mandy Bourne reaches for her inhaler with increasing frequency these days, the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that afflicts her flaring with every temperature shift in the top-floor social housing flat she shares with her 80-year-old mother in the West Midlands. "It's red hot in the flat. The sun is just beaming in," she explains, her words punctuated by the breathlessness that defines her condition. Across the country, solid brick homes like hers are doing what they have done for decades: absorbing heat by day and radiating it back into rooms that never truly cool, transforming domestic spaces into oppressive environments that exacerbate existing health conditions.

The phenomenon is amplified in urban centres, where retained warmth can push night-time temperatures as much as 7C higher than in the surrounding countryside, an effect known as the urban heat island. Its dangers are most acute in the early hours, when bodies require cooler air for recovery and find none. Modelling conducted by researchers at the University of Birmingham following a previous West Midlands heatwave reached a sobering conclusion: the heat island effect alone accounted for roughly half of the 130 heat-related deaths recorded during that event. For Jo Shields, head of sustainability at Walsall Housing Group, which manages 23,000 homes across the region, the complaint is a familiar one. "The heat gain stays within the concrete or the brick," she observes, "so the night-time cooling becomes harder."

Last summer, as the region sweltered, residents of Ellum Pointe, a whg scheme for the over-55s, began telling their landlords they could not cool their flats. The response was improvised but effective: the community room was transformed into a makeshift cool space, with all windows and doors closed and a mobile air-conditioning unit installed. Shields likens the approach to the warm spaces opened during the pandemic for those unable to afford heating, but notes that her role has shifted from a sole focus on decarbonisation to a more complex balancing act between reducing emissions and adapting homes to rising temperatures. Across the country, landlords are confronting similar dilemmas.

The question of how Britain should respond to intensifying heatwaves has exposed a fundamental fissure in climate policy. For four decades, wealthy nations have concentrated overwhelmingly on mitigation – reducing the carbon emissions that cause global warming – while adaptation, including designing housing resilient to higher temperatures, has languished. In 2023, some $1.8 trillion was directed towards mitigation globally, while adaptation secured less than 5 per cent of that figure, scraping just $65 billion. The prevailing orthodoxy held that spending too heavily on adaptation constituted a surrender in the fight against climate change, but that consensus has been challenged by influential voices including Bill Gates, who argued in a memo last year that the climate movement's "doomsday" fixation on temperature targets had diverted resources from measures that most improve lives in a warming world.

Gates's intervention, which insisted that climate change would not lead to humanity's demise and called for investment in cooling where it is most needed, drew sharp criticism from climate scientists who accused him of constructing false dichotomies between mitigation and adaptation. Some, including President Donald Trump, interpreted the remarks as an endorsement of climate scepticism. Gates maintained he was not arguing against emissions cuts but rather for spending where it saves the most suffering. The row exposed a fault line that is becoming increasingly apparent this summer: not whether to cut carbon or adapt to the heat, but how much to allocate to each.

There is a further complication: mitigation is investable in ways that adaptation is not. Heat pumps and electric vehicles can be marketed and sold; spending on shade, ventilation, and cooler hospitals and homes produces little in the way of bankable returns, even if it reduces long-term climate costs. Baroness Brown, the engineer Julia King, who chairs the adaptation committee of the government's Climate Change Committee, argues that this imbalance is enshrined in UK law. Under the Climate Change Act, her committee recommends legally binding carbon budgets that ministers must deliver, with annual scrutiny. Adaptation carries no such enforcement mechanism; the government writes its own risk assessment and its own plans. "Essentially, the government writes an essay, and our job is to say, is it doing the things it said would do in its essay. It's not actually to say, are these things any good," she explains, adding that her committee has spent "almost 20 years pulling our hair out".

This year has been different, however. With exquisite timing, the committee published a report just as the first heatwave struck Britain in May, urging lawmakers to set hard adaptation targets. The modelling suggests that providing cooling support for the 30 per cent most vulnerable homes, alongside cooling in hospitals and preventive care visits, could reduce 40 per cent of the increase in heat-related deaths predicted for 2050. The report also addresses the contentious issue of air conditioning, recommending that cooling units be fitted in hospitals and care homes within a decade and in schools within 25 years. This recommendation cuts against years of official advice favouring passive cooling – shade, ventilation and design features that bring down temperatures without mechanical means.

Professor Mat Santamouris of the University of New South Wales, the world's most-cited researcher on urban overheating, argues that machines should be the last resort. His studies have shown that reflective roofing alone can drag indoor temperatures from around 43C towards 30C, while a ceiling fan provides comfort at a fraction of the cost. He describes the proliferation of unshaded glass towers in cities as "crazy", insisting that "we cannot air-condition our way out of climate change". Santamouris is scathing about the influence of the air-conditioning industry, which he describes as "extremely powerful", and points out that passive cooling generates its own economic growth through spending on plumbers and builders.

Against this view stand those who contend that Britain's hostility to cooling has curdled into a form of masochism. David Lawrence of the Centre for British Progress puts the case plainly: we do not tell people to insulate their homes in winter and then skip the radiators, so why insist that shade and shutters are sufficient in summer? He notes that air conditioning is standard in offices, hotels and shops, "but we don't expect it for schools and hospitals – which is kind of odd, because those are places where millions of people are every day", and where heat measurably impairs concentration, learning and health.

The dispute is becoming political. Some London councils, following a planning "cooling hierarchy", prioritise low-energy cooling methods over air conditioning and have in a small number of cases ordered property owners to remove units. The Conservative front bench has denounced this as "dark ages" miserabilism, while other MPs and commentators demand an "air-con revolution". Since April, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme in England and Wales has offered £2,500 towards a reversible air-air heat pump – a machine that warms in winter and cools in summer, effectively Britain's first air-conditioning subsidy, though badged as a heat pump. The grant is worth only a third of the £7,500 available for a heating-only model, and uptake has been negligible: in its first month, only around 45 households claimed it, compared with thousands claiming the heating-only version. In Scotland, a £7,500 grant is available for heat pumps via the Home Energy scheme, but air-air versions offering cooling are excluded, and in Northern Ireland there is no universal heat pump grant at all.

The scheme is closed to social housing and newbuilds, a restriction that critics argue excludes the very people most exposed to extreme heat. Keisha, a resident of Woolwich in south-east London, says her top-floor flat reaches 43C in a heatwave, describing the building as "inhumane". She and around twenty neighbours in Canada Court and Clifton Lodge are taking their landlord, PA Housing, to court over homes they say are unfit to live in. Even the landlord concedes the difficulty, with its chief executive accepting that a growing number of residents face "uncomfortably warm temperatures… due to the changing climate" in homes "designed to keep heat in rather than keep them cool". Keisha is precisely the tenant for whom the state's new cooling grant might have been designed, but as a social tenant she is barred from it. Baroness Brown's committee has found that the most deprived neighbourhoods are more than seven times as likely to be badly exposed to heat.

There is a cruel physics beneath this financial unfairness. Air conditioning does not destroy heat; it moves it – out of the flat and into the street, where, Santamouris notes, it warms the air neighbours breathe and drives up demand for still more cooling. In his studies of Sydney, he found this effect increased cooling demand by about a third. The machines that keep the financially comfortable cool make everyone else's nights worse; as wealthier households cool their rooms, the rest fall further behind, a thermal divide opening street by street. The demand peaks on still, hot evenings just as the wind drops and solar fades, leaving gas to supply the extra energy and generating further greenhouse gas emissions. The same heat that drives demand also weakens supply: gas turbines lose output as air warms, and in June several UK plants had to be turned down.

Yet such is the scale of the heat that people are voting with their wallets. Demand for portable air-conditioning units is surging, regardless of environmental considerations. The evidence from experts, however, suggests this path should not be pursued. Santamouris and Baroness Brown reach for the same answer: passive cooling first, machines where genuinely needed, clean power behind them, and the lesson France learned painfully in the deadly heatwave of 2003 – that the vulnerable must be protected rather than left to improvise. Cooling every home by machine would strain the grid and warm the streets, hampering the effort to slow the warming that drives the demand. In Tokyo, Santamouris says, so many air conditioners now pump waste heat into the air that the exhaust alone generates heat measured at close to a thousand watts per square metre – as much energy as falls from the sky at midday. "It's another sun," he adds with emphasis. "It's not the same in London. But if we continue in the same way, in some years we will have the same results."

For Jo Shields, the prospect of such a future is deeply unsettling. "It's our survival," she says; most days, she tries to bury the thought, "because otherwise it terrifies me". Meanwhile, Mandy Bourne says she is grateful that the new community room with its air conditioning provides some respite for her and her mother. "We sit there all day with it on," she says. "It helps so much I want one in my flat." The gap between what is available and what is needed, between those who can afford relief and those who cannot, is a chasm that Britain's summer of sweltering heat has brought into sharp and uncomfortable focus.