How policy is designing out cooling solutions just as the temperature is rising in Britain - Chris Hocknell
Britain was built to keep the cold out, not the heat. As we breathe a collective sigh of relief as the sky clouds over, we must now accept that heat waves are now the status quo. By mid-July, 2026 had already recorded more days above 30°C than the whole of 1976, and became the first year on record to reach 35°C in May, June and July alike.
As temperatures rise, so do deaths from extreme heat. UKHSA's estimates 2,877 heat-associated deaths in England across the May and June 2026 heatwaves alone. This is not to mention the closed schools, cancelled trains and failing crops.
You'd expect a government facing this to be urgently pro-cooling. Instead, it seems almost embarrassed by the subject. At the local and regional level London Borough Councils and the Greater London Authority are expressly anti-cooling, as they consider it a crime against the climate.
You will be required to submit applications to the local authority for permission, and for planning applications you will need to follow the Cooling Hierarchy, a policy explicitly built to ‘design-out’ the need for cooling, meaning you need to prove that your building needs cooling. Controlling your temperature in summer is not a right in Britain in 2026, it is something you must earn from the Cooling Commissars.
In July, the Environmental Investigation Agency warned that without a national cooling plan, Britain risks a chaotic, unmanaged reliance on air conditioning that would drive up energy demand, emissions and inequality.
There’s an obvious fix; one that the government has already thrown its support behind. The UK has around 412 heat pumps per 100,000 people, against a European average of 3,068.
Requests for domestic air conditioning installations have rocketed by 320 per cent compared with the same period last year.
This is why reversible heat pumps matter. Unlike an AC unit, they heat homes efficiently in winter and cool them in summer, using the same kit. In April, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme quietly began offering a £2,500 grant for these reversible heat pump systems. This was only a modest step in the right direction. £2,500 against the full £7,500 for a heat-only pump still prices out exactly the households who need cooling assistance most: those in poorly insulated older housing, or on lower incomes with the least capacity to simply ‘buy their way cool’.
If the government wants to drive real heat pump uptake, create the ‘green jobs’ they supposedly love, and prepare the country for hotter summers, the fix is straightforward. Match the reversible heat pump subsidy to the heat-only one. The emissions cost of running a heat pump in cooling mode for a few weeks a year is trivial (roughly 5 per cent) against the gains of greater uptake.
Equally, it shouldn't be mumbled in the fine print. Efficient, electric technology that keeps us warm in January and cool in July should be the centrepiece of Britain's climate-preparedness policy.
Sadly government energy policy has become a farce over the last two decades, but at the very least it needs to achieve some level of consistency in its positions. Having one department using climate change scenarios to terrify the public into climate action, and another effectively saying ‘suck it up’ to the impacts of climate change is a primary example of how dysfunctional our approach to energy and environment is.
Chris Hocknell is the founder of Eight Versa.