UK public services under strain as temperature tops 40C

The UK experienced its highest ever temperature of 40.3C on Tuesday, according to the Met Office, as a heatwave gripped the country and caused widespread disruption on roads and railways and in the healthcare system.

The recording at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, 150 miles north of London, came as a large area of eastern and southern England suffered under extreme heat conditions.

It eclipsed the previous all-time high of 38.7C set in Cambridge in 2019, and was almost matched in several parts of London, including Kew Gardens, Heathrow airport and St James’s Park, all of which recorded temperatures above 40C.

Elsewhere in the capital, dry vegetation caused a number of grassland fires, forcing the London Fire Brigade to declare a major incident. In Wennington, close to the Dartford Crossing on the further eastern outskirts of the city, several houses were destroyed by a fire — one of at least 10 blazes across Greater London, including Twickenham, Dagenham and Uxbridge.

The record was set after transport secretary Grant Shapps warned that it could take “decades” to make Britain’s transport system more resilient to extreme heatwaves.

The high temperatures also hit the NHS, highlighting the poor state of many hospitals and other buildings after years in which capital spending has been severely squeezed.

Staff at Guy’s and St Thomas’, a major London teaching hospital group, was forced to resort to communicating by mobile phone and using paper record-keeping after its computer servers crashed in the heat.

Management declared a “critical site incident”, according to internal communications seen by the Financial Times, which attributed the outage “to external temperatures and failing air conditioning units”.

The hospital told patients via Twitter that it was “having some problems with our IT and telephone systems”.

Miriam Deakin, head of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, said the health service was “running hot” as the heatwave continued into a second day, “impacting urgent and emergency care and some planned care”.

“Trusts simply don’t have the infrastructure they need to handle this extreme weather,” she added.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said the record temperature was “a harbinger of things to come” and that going weak on net zero commitments now would be storing up worse pain for the future.

Across England the railways ran significantly reduced services on Tuesday, with cancellations on lines running north of London as the heat overwhelmed infrastructure designed for a maximum temperature of 35C. 

All services running north to York on the East Coast Mainline from London’s King’s Cross station were cancelled. The station concourse, which normally handles 220,000 passengers a day, was deserted; departure boards showed long columns of cancelled services.

Transport for London, which runs the capital’s bus, underground and train network, said journeys were down 30 per cent from a week ago as commuters heeded advice to stay at home.

The changing climate will present the UK with a long-term challenge to upgrade its infrastructure, Shapps warned. Steel railway tracks absorb heat and are prone to buckling and sagging, increasing the risk of derailments. On Monday, some tracks reached 62C, according to Network Rail.

Shapps told Sky News that infrastructure took decades to build, citing the example of millions of miles of roads where tarmac would need replacing. Councils have this week put gritters on standby to spread sand on melting highways.

“We’ve seen the hottest days ever recorded have come in the last 10 to 15 years. So we’re going to see this more. It’s a huge infrastructure to replace,” he said.

The Met Office also said the country had probably experienced its warmest-ever night on Monday, with temperatures as high as 25C in some areas, beating the previous record of 23.9C set in 1990.

Dann Mitchell, Met Office joint chair in climate hazards and a professor of climate science at Bristol university, warned such tropical nights put stress on the human body, increasing the risk of strokes and heart attacks.

“Even in our current climate a record breaker of above 40C is thought to be extremely rare, but as our climate warms we expect to see these kinds of exceedances every couple of years,” he added.

Additional reporting by Sarah Neville, Robert Wright, Nathalie Thomas and Bethan Staton