UK Tries to Map Out Risks to Public Services of Extreme Weather

Extreme weather is having a measurable impact on Britain’s public finances as areas including railways, prisons and healthcare are increasingly affected, the UK’s National Audit Office said.

(Bloomberg) -- Extreme weather is having a measurable impact on Britain’s public finances as areas including railways, prisons and healthcare are increasingly affected, the UK’s National Audit Office said. 

The full scale of the damage remains difficult to gauge, however, as many government departments are failing to provide the disclosures needed for a proper assessment, the NAO said in a report published on Monday.

“Parliament needs clear information on the resilience of infrastructure, service provision and finances to climate change, and on how these risks are being managed,” said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, in a statement. “We expect this reporting to become more useful over time.”

This is the first year in which larger UK government departments have been required to publish the full details of the risks they face due to global warming. In many cases, efforts to understand such exposures remain at an early stage, the NAO said. Disclosures are necessary to help lawmakers keep track of how prepared the UK’s public services are, it said. 

Britons are facing increasingly severe — and in some cases deadly — periods of extreme heat followed by flash floods. Intense heat has already resulted in damage to roads and railways, and left schools and hospitals dangerously hot this summer. At the same time, floods are becoming more frequent and more destructive to key infrastructure such as railways. 

Flooding was the most common hazard identified in the disclosures monitored by the NAO. Some 89% of prisons face a high risk of flooding, while sites managed by the National Health Service saw 391 flooding incidents in 2024-25. Among the many impacts of overheating is the tendency toward more violence in prisons, the NAO report found. 

“Government still has much to do, particularly in setting meaningful targets,” said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the UK Parliament’s Committee of Public Accounts, commenting on the NAO’s findings. “Better reporting is encouraging, but Parliament and the public need more than a list of risks: they need to know how prepared government is to manage them.”