Lives 'will be lost' unless UK does more to combat wildfires, committee chairwoman says

Lives "will be lost" unless more is done to combat the increasing risk of wildfires, the chairwoman of the UK's Climate Change Committee (CCC) has said after a record number of blazes this summer.

Baroness Brown told BBC File on 4 Investigates "not enough action" had been taken in light of predictions the UK is facing longer, drier summers because of global warming.

Earlier this year, one man died in a wildfire in Gloucestershire, while 19 homes were destroyed in Stourbridge, near Birmingham, and villagers were evacuated in the Cairngorms.

The government said it was investing nearly £100m to improve national resilience capabilities, which includes piloting specially trained firefighting teams.

UK 'not prepared for the changing climate'

As far back as 2012, the independent CCC warned of "more frequent wildfires due to warmer and drier conditions".

File on 4 Investigates has seen figures from the National Fire Chiefs Council showing that 2026 set a new all-time high, with 1,350 wildfires in England and Wales, up by more than 300 on last year and more than 1,000 on 2024.

Records for the number of reported wildfires were also broken in 2022 and 2025.

Baroness Brown said the CCC, formed in 2008, has been telling the government for years that the UK is "not prepared for the changing climate". She continued: "The warnings have been there and not enough action has been taken.

"I fear that lives will be lost. We need to be doing much more education and preparation."

She said that included investing in specialist teams and equipment, but also "planning our woodlands, thinking about fire breaks" and early warning systems.

By 2050, she said the risk of wildfires could be doubled across much of the UK.

Tinderbox Britain - Are we ready for more wildfires?

File on 4 Investigates looks at whether the country is prepared for the growing threat, and if the emergency services have the resources to cope.

'No-one should have this experience'

Uttam and Sandy Shiralkar are still coming to terms with the loss of their family home in Stourbridge after it was engulfed by a wildfire in August.

Sandy, a surgeon, said: "We saw the complete destruction of the house. There was no roof, no floorboards. Nothing. No-one should have this experience."

The fires started accidentally in fields in Stourbridge, where farming machinery was in use on the hottest day of the year.

The couple are now living in temporary accommodation. Uttam said: "Every loss is painful, but losing a house has got a different dimension. Coming back to normality is going to take a long time."

Fire crews dangerously overstretched

While the risk of wildfires is on the rise, the number of firefighters has been in decline.

Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, which represents firefighters, said more than a fifth of firefighter and control room posts across the UK – some 12,000 jobs - had been cut since 2010, which left crews dangerously overstretched over the summer.

"We had firefighters from London being mobilised to Yorkshire, firefighters from Merseyside being mobilised to Dorset," he said. "The effect, when you have wildfires happening at the same time across the UK, is there's just not enough firefighters on the ground to be able to deal with them."

Phil Garrigan, chairman of the National Fire Chiefs Council, which represents senior managers of the UK's fire and rescue services, said he welcomed the £97m investment to provide six specialist firefighting teams to work across the UK.

But he insisted more money was needed to boost aerial firefighting capability and improve specialist equipment for firefighters. He said: "The money has to be there, otherwise we'll be going into 2027 and 2028 with a likely occurrence that we'll see what we've seen in 2026, which is 50 plus homes lost and families devastated by the impacts of wildfire. We've got to get ahead of that."

State-of-the-art equipment such as dedicated off-road vehicles will be bought as part of the £97m investment, which the government said was funding the biggest upgrade to national resilience for 20 years.