Wildfire tsar to tackle growing threat of blazes from extreme heat

Labour will appoint Britain’s first ever wildfire tsar to help tackle the growing threat of blazes linked to extreme weather and climate change.
The National Resilience Wildfire Adviser will be tasked to “assess what additional national capabilities might be needed to increase resilience to the wildfire risk and ensure co-ordination across the sector,” the Home Office has said.
News of the appointment comes as temperatures have soared across the UK. This year’s hottest temperature of 34.8C, was recorded in Cambridge earlier this month, according to the Met Office. It is the 11th year since 1961 in which temperatures have reached this figure but six of those have come in the past decade, indicating a dramatic long-term rise in temperatures.
Currently the government assesses and mitigates the risk in conjunction with the National Fire Chiefs Council and the England and Wales Wildlife Forum.
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has said that urgent action is needed to replace the equipment used by firefighters to deal with environmental disasters such as wildfires. The cost of replacing the kit is likely to be about £100 million, according to the BBC.
In particular, the large high-volume pumps currently used to put out wildfires, but originally designed for use in flooding incidents, need to be replaced with smaller modern pods that can be easily transferred to remote locations in the countryside where a wildfire can often start. A project to replace equipment was launched three years ago but the upgrading of these pumps is still outstanding.
The FBU has said that persistent cuts to funding and staff have meant that firefighters have been “pushed beyond their limits”.
Matt Wrack, the FBU general secretary, told the BBC: “Resources must be reviewed and expanded. We cannot wait until the next crisis hits.”
More than one in five firefighter jobs have been cut since 2010, with 82 fire stations and 17 control rooms shut down. The average time taken for firefighters to arrive at an incident has risen by more than a minute over the past decade. The increased rate and danger of wildfires across southern Europe has heightened concern among officials.
The risk of fires in holiday destinations across the region is high or extreme in many cases, according to Foreign Office travel advice.
In Greece earlier this month, a fire near Athens killed one woman and led to the evacuation of thousands of homes, while an elderly man was killed in North Macedonia due to a forest fire that had been raging since early July.
On the whole, wildfires in the UK are less common. However, between July and August 2022, 24,316 fires were reported across England.
Dozens of houses in Wennington, east London, were destroyed in a large fire in the same period. In opposition, Labour accused the Conservative government at the time of “put[ting] the smoke alarm on snooze”, and proposed a “whole systems approach” to wildfire risk, through measures such as the creation of a minister for resilience within the Cabinet Office.
According to the Home Office’s annual report (2023-2024): “the Home Office has ensured that the lessons identified from the 2022 wildfire season, which saw extreme heat and an increase in the number of wildfire occurrence, have been addressed and incorporated into response plans. These plans are tested regularly.”