The UK’s climate has flipped, scorching summers are now more common than harsh winters, yet our buildings remain stubbornly rooted in a colder past, writes Kevin Morrissey.
I appreciated the opportunity to be quoted in The Times last week as someone with ideas on how we should adapt our built environment to cope with a warming climate. However, due to the normal pressures on space in our national print media, my comments were somewhat truncated.
‘Morrissey at BESA conceded that air conditioning and ventilation were “not a panacea”. Keeping homes cool would also involve shade from awnings and trees, Mediterranean-style shutters, and other things.’
In his famous speech about putting a man on the moon, then US President John F Kennedy said: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
There was much speculation then about what he was referring to and, while not claiming similar levels of public interest in the utterances of BESA’s technical director, the curious Times reader might similarly wonder: “What are these OTHER things?”
Well, the list of other things is extensive and varied, because adapting to a warming client, like putting a man on the moon, is hard and getting harder because the impact of climate change is speeding up. The Met Office is already forecasting another heatwave for next week.
Overheating homes
It requires a rounded (holistic) approach that marries government policy with technical solutions and incentives for changing behaviours. However, to succeed we must finally accept that we no longer live in a cold country. Successive governments have prepared Britain for a climate model that no longer exists and the result is a nation of overheating homes never designed to keep people cool.
80% of UK homes overheat in the summer and the British Medical Journal anticipates annual heat related deaths across the UK could exceed 10,000 by 2050. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says there have already been more than 1,300 excess deaths across Europe since 21 June this year linked to the extreme heat.
BESA members and the specialist firms registered with the cooling industry scheme REFCOM, which the Association manages, have been sounding alarm bells about overheating and the related risks of poor air quality in buildings for years, but government policy had remained rooted in the belief that we were still living in a cold country.
The first sign of a modest shift came late last year, when the government announced that they would be expanding the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), which has been contributing to consumers making the switch from boilers to heat pumps. This expansion included air-to-air heat pumps, which can also provide cooling and air conditioning to homes as well as heating.
However, the latest government figures show that up to May 2026, there were no air-to-air heat pump installations carried out using the BUS scheme at all. While this was clearly a step in the right direction, as with many other government initiatives there was little advance warning, so the frameworks to deliver the initiative are in catch-up mode.
Also, these frameworks demand higher levels of competence, so individuals and businesses must weigh up the pros and cons of investing in training and upskilling. Sadly, there is a trust issue: MEP businesses have seen previous government-backed schemes come and go, like the ECO scheme which provided full heat pump funding for lower income households but was scrapped because poor levels of competence resulted in botched work on the insulation upgrades it also funded.
Responsible businesses, who train and develop their people are all too aware of the risk that the benefits of investment in further training may be short lived if funding is cut when the current or future government needs to make savings. Heat pumps have, in effect, been a victim of the fallout from the insulation scandal and a replacement for the ECO scheme is urgently needed.
Also vital are measures to reduce running costs by addressing the unfair burden of subsidies levied on electricity bills. Narrowing the ‘spark gap’ between electricity and gas is fundamental because, currently, energy efficient electrical systems like heat pumps are being unfairly penalised. Households pay four times more for a unit of electricity than gas which is proving to be the biggest hurdle to the UK’s plans for the decarbonisation of heat (and cooling).
Policies
It is heartening that influential bodies like the All Party Parliamentary Group for Healthy Homes and Buildings, of which BESA is a sponsor, are taking a lead on addressing some of these issues with government, but other policies and public sector programmes may be making the problem worse.
The Warm Homes Plan and the Great British Insulation Scheme are aimed at reshaping how we heat buildings and, while better insulation may help to reduce heating bills, the improved thermal performance also traps heat and moisture. This compounds the risk of overheating, damp, mould and poor air quality, all of which exacerbate health issues and increase mortality.
The Future Homes Standard does, at least, work hand-in-hand with Building Regulations Part O (Overheating), which sets strict, mandatory regulations to prevent homes from getting too hot including the need for improved ventilation to remove heat, limits on solar gain through the building’s fabric using ‘passive’ measures, and compliance modelling to aimed at ensuring developers meet overheating standards.
However, this only applies to new homes and, as the government is all too aware, we do not build enough of those. Also, as Part O only came into force in 2022, anything that was already designed and in construction before then is totally unsuited to the hot weather we now experience.
This includes thousands of relatively recently built heavily glazed high-rise buildings with overheating apartments and enclosed internal corridors that become dangerously hot. We have, effectively, built a generation of tall buildings that will be uninhabitable by mid-century during the summer.
Overheating is part of the same health and safety crisis that is not properly reflected in our current policies or the new building safety regime introduced after the Grenfell Tower disaster.
However, reforming grant funding and addressing the spark gap could trigger a wider national retrofit strategy that improves the overall health related performance of homes through whole house upgrades – this could be done quite quickly.
Also, as solar panels perform best in summer conditions, much of the electricity generated by these systems could be used to power heat pumps and other forms of electrical AC when we need them most.
Ventilation and (AC if it installed) also require initial verification, followed by maintenance and monitoring once in use. The starting point of many IAQ and overheating problems, damp and mould, and the resulting health and wellbeing issues, is a tick-box exercise at handover, confirming something has been installed rather than if it will help to maintain a comfortable, health and safe environment over its operating lifetime.
Unqualified
Look at the problems we have had with mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) systems that were installed in their thousands by unqualified operators, never explained to homeowners, and never maintained.
However, smart controls and metering, coupled with tariff adjustment for general consumers, could be used to shape behaviours and usage patterns. And, we have Winter Fuel payments for those at risk from cold so how about targeted Summer Cool Payments for those most at risk from the impact of overheating to help make mechanical cooling more affordable?
So, a lot of things on the to do list – admittedly many aimed at accelerating the deployment of heat pumps (and possibly AC) but also leading to a properly planned focus on whole house retrofitting and maintenance.
Just as the insulation programme was intended to reduce DEMAND for heat, so retrofitting with renewable powered heat pumps, ventilation and passive measures could cut the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool. That way a new cooling strategy could move in step with the push to decarbonise buildings on the road to Net Zero.