Contribution
My Lords, I rise to speak to several amendments in this group, Amendments 125, 126 and 181, all of which address the issues of overheating.
I shall constrain myself to commenting on the amendments in my name, but this is the direction of the overall travel of the group. I do not have any particular attachment to the different means by which this issue is addressed here. What is very clear from the level of engagement is that there is a serious issue of overheating, as reflected by this group of amendments.
I shall start with a statistic that is quite shocking. Since 2016, about 570,000 new homes have been built without adequate adaptations to respond to increased temperatures. We have heard from Members of your Lordships’ House who are members of the Committee on Climate Change, and many of us in this debate will have heard from the reports about the inadequacy of climate adaptation. We were speaking in an earlier group about the inadequacy of dealing with flooding. This is overheating, which brings huge financial costs. We have had heatwaves this year but, if we go back to 2022, we saw temperatures over 40 degrees centigrade for the first time, which resulted in more than 3,000 heat-related deaths, the highest level of mortality since the first heatwave plan was written in 2023. We know that, with the climate emergency, this is going to happen more and more often at greater and greater levels. It is particularly the young and old who are most vulnerable to this, but we are increasingly in a situation where everybody is vulnerable.
To go back to a point that I raised on an earlier group about ventilation and so on, we are also going to see, sadly, an increasing number of fires, in natural environments and probably, as we saw in London in 2022, in urban environments as well. That is where we also have to think about wildfire smoke and its impact on human health.
I want to go to the issue that we keep raising again and again in amendments—that this is very much a social justice and inequality issue. It is broadly the more economically disadvantaged households that are at greatest risks from these overheating issues, although it is not just those households. Almost 5.5 million children, over half of those in England, are living in homes at risk of overheating; according to the English Housing Survey 2022 analysis by the Resolution Foundation, more than 1 million of those children are living in London, mostly in social housing.
These amendments look at allowing local authorities, where the local climatic data indicates elevated risk—which, in essence, now means everywhere in the UK—to take specific action under the Town and Country Planning Act. Also—and this is important, and it is crucial that we discuss it under my Amendment 181 about cooling hierarchy guidance—we heard during the recent heatwaves that we have experienced in the UK a great deal of discussion about air conditioning: “Why do we not have air conditioning? Why don’t we install air conditioning?” Of course, the problem with air conditioning is that it is innately counterproductive: you are cooling the home and heating the outside, whether that is through the electricity used or even very directly, with urban heat islands, and so on. Air conditioning is not the answer—and then there are the inequality issues that arise from that as well.
Amendment 181 talks about the Secretary of State providing guidance to local planning authorities to outline a cooling hierarchy and provide guidance on how it is applied. This is where again—it is the problem with green politics of everything being related to everything else—I have to cross-reference back to our discussion about nature. One of the best ways to provide cooling in environments is to have trees and greenery; it is much better than concrete, as it reflects back the heat heating up the area around it. It is about having a structured approach and looking at greenery and at passive and sustainable design elements.
Let us think, for example, of the people of Yemen, who have a traditional architecture, in the hottest temperatures that humans can just about stand, that is cool and comfortable, based on centuries of knowledge of how to build in ways that encourage breezes and bring the air coming over. We come back to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, not currently in her place, and the value of water as a key cooling element—a breeze coming across water, circulating through a house and cooling it down; shades in the right directions and in the right places; and, obviously, the thermal mass of a house so that it does not heat up too quickly but also ensures that it can cool itself down.