Is Britain in a wildfire crisis, and is 2026 the worst year on record?

What is being shared

On 21 September 2026 the Liberal Democrats published a release by Pippa Heylings MP, their spokesperson for energy security and net zero, headlined “Britain’s Wildfire Crisis”, with the standfirst “Record-breaking heatwaves and severe droughts are making blazes like the Dunwich Heath and Stourbridge fires an existential climate reality rather than isolated emergencies” (Liberal Democrats, 21 September 2026). Its one figure for the scale of the problem follows: “The Government’s lack of a coherent action plan is leaving 1.8 million British homes exposed.” The release names no source for it, though it links to the motion passed that day, which does.

It reports that party members had passed an emergency policy that day: conference motion F33B, also titled “Britain’s Wildfire Crisis”, which applies to England. The motion gives the figures. It opens: “The Met Office confirmed that Summer 2026 was the UK’s hottest on record, with five widespread heatwaves, 40 days of temperatures above 30°C and the most wildfires ever recorded.” It adds that “Fire and rescue services attended 458 wildfires in England and Wales in July, the highest in any month on record”, and that Ordnance Survey found “1.8 million homes in Britain are exposed to increasing risk from wildfires which are no longer confined to remote areas”.

We have not found a news outlet that ran the release under a headline of its own, so the headline in circulation is the party’s own. Taken one at a time, most of the motion’s figures trace to real sources, though not always to the one it names. Two of them, the five heatwaves and the 40 days above 30°C, count spring and summer together rather than the summer the motion names, and one, the share of Dunwich Heath that burnt, we could not check.

Is 2026 a record year? On the fire chiefs’ count, yes; on the area, not yet

Counted by incidents, yes, for England and Wales, in the fire chiefs’ figures. The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) said on 17 August 2026 that fire and rescue services in England and Wales had “responded to 1,132 wildfires between 1st January and 16 August 2026, surpassing the 1,017 total for the whole of 2025”; that is its latest published count. The figures come from National Resilience data, which the NFCC has published for each year from 2020, and they show 2025 as the previous highest, ahead of 994 in 2022 (NFCC, 5 September 2025 and 11 August 2026). The NFCC called July, with 458 incidents, “the busiest month ever recorded for wildfires in England and Wales” (NFCC, 11 August 2026). It has not yet published a total for August. By 15 September the Defra minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter told MPs: “We have had over 1,300 wildfires—record numbers” (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 15 September 2026); she did not say which count or area that covers.

For these counts a wildfire is a fire that meets one or more of five tests, including an area of at least a hectare, flames longer than 1.5 metres, at least four fire service appliances, or crews committed for at least six hours. Counted far more broadly, fire and rescue services in England attend around 30,000 wildfires a year (Department for Transport and Met Office, October 2025, citing the Forestry Commission); the record is on the fire chiefs’ narrower count, and it is theirs: the motion credits “the most wildfires ever recorded” to the Met Office, but its summer statement does not mention wildfires.

Measured by area burnt, not yet. The EU’s Copernicus EFFIS system maps larger fires from satellite imagery across the whole UK. In its UK series, which begins in 2006, 2025 holds the record: 47,879 hectares in 181 mapped fires, against a previous high of 28,754 hectares in 2019. The Climate Change Committee calls 2025 “the most destructive wildfire season ever recorded”, including “the first wildfire over 10,000 hectares in the UK, which occurred in Scotland in June 2025” (Climate Change Committee, 20 May 2026). Our wildfire tracker, which reads the same EFFIS feed, showed 24,840 hectares burnt in 2026 by the morning of 24 September, in 77 mapped fires: about half last year’s total, so 2026 would need almost as much again to pass it. That is already 2.8 times the 2006–2025 average for a whole year (8,838 hectares), though that average includes six early years for which EFFIS shows no mapped fires; over the 14 years with figures, 2026 is about twice the average.

The two measures count different things in different places. The fire chiefs’ count takes in every fire in England and Wales that meets its threshold, most of them far smaller than the fires satellites can map: for 2025 it recorded 1,017 in England and Wales, while EFFIS mapped 181 across the whole UK. The satellites map only the larger fires, but across the whole UK, including Scotland, where 2025’s biggest fire burned. So: yes on the number of fires in England and Wales, not so far on the ground burnt across the UK, and the year is not over.

The hottest summer on record

The Met Office’s provisional figures make summer 2026 the UK’s hottest in a series that goes back to 1884: a mean of 16.5°C, 0.4°C above the 16.1°C of 2025; a peak of 38.2°C at Hartpury College on 13 August; and 54 stations breaking their all-time daily maximum. It says the record-breaking summer “was made around 130 times more likely because of human-induced climate change” (Met Office, 1 September 2026, updated 17 September). England and Wales each had their driest July on record, provisionally: England had 6.5mm of rain, 10% of its average for the month and less than half the previous record of 13.4mm from 1911, and Wales 9.3mm (Met Office, 3 August 2026).

The NFCC noted on 11 August that more than two-thirds of England and all of Wales were officially in drought, a status the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales declare; the drought tracker shows where it stands now. The Met Office’s summer statement does not count heatwaves or mention wildfires, and the count of days above 30°C for June to August that the Met Office published separately is 33 (Met Office, 4 September 2026); the motion’s 40 includes the heat of late May.

Is it still a crisis? Conditions on 24 September

“Crisis” is not an official measure. The party uses the word, and so did a Natural England blog in August, which said the UK was facing “a growing wildfire crisis this year” (Natural England, 10 August 2026); by the measures that do exist, August was exceptional. On 14 August, the day of the emergency alert, there were 11 major incidents relating to wildfires across the UK, which Peter Lee, director for fire at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, told MPs was unprecedented (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 15 September 2026). By 17 August the NFCC’s chair, Phil Garrigan, said “we are beginning to see incident numbers reduce”, and added: “But we are not out of this yet.”

The season is not over. The official measure for England and Wales is the Met Office Fire Severity Index, which rates from 1 (low) to 5 (exceptional) how severe a fire could become if one started, not how likely one is. On 24 September it put fire severity at high in 838 of the 1,734 ten-kilometre squares covering England and Wales and at very high in 59, mostly across the East Midlands and neighbouring parts of eastern England. None was at exceptional, the level at which open-access land can be closed. Its forecast for Sunday 27 September has very high in about a third of squares, mostly in southern and eastern England; forecasts further ahead are less certain (Met Office Fire Severity Index, published by Natural England, 24 September 2026). Our wildfire tracker, which reads the EU’s Copernicus fire weather index at one point per region, showed moderate or low in the 12 regions it could read that morning. The two are different scales, and for England and Wales the Fire Severity Index is the official one.

So the answer depends on the tense. This year has brought the most wildfires in the fire chiefs’ published figures for England and Wales, which start in 2020, and, by the government’s account, the most extensive use of the emergency alert system in response to an active incident. July was the busiest month in the fire chiefs’ figures as published on 11 August, and incidents were falling by mid-August, though the first 16 days of August had already brought 351 and no total for August has been published. On 24 September fire severity was still high or very high across just over half of England and Wales, and the advice below still applies.

What “1.8 million homes” measures

The figure is Ordnance Survey’s, a year old, and it measures proximity, not danger. On 12 August 2025 OS found that “Over 1.8 million British homes sit within the first 100 metres of urban-rural edges”, about 7% of homes across Britain: the strip where streets meet fields, heath, moor or woodland. Greater Manchester (107,257 addresses), West Yorkshire (81,842), Essex (62,340), Kent (58,196) and Lancashire (54,399) had the most (Ordnance Survey, 12 August 2025).

That is a map of where a fire could reach houses, drawn to help fire services plan. It counts homes within 100 metres of the edge of a built-up area; it is not a count of homes threatened this year, and it does not change with the weather. OS says so itself: “not all these homes are equally vulnerable”, though their closeness to vegetation and to people makes them worth planning for. On that reading the release’s word, “exposed”, is fair, and so is the motion’s “exposed to increasing risk”. Linking the figure to “the Government’s lack of a coherent action plan” is a political argument; the figure itself is geography, and it was published before this summer began.

What the government has done, and told Parliament since

The release calls the government’s approach “piecemeal emergency responses” without saying what was done. On 20 June 2026 the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government announced specialist wildfire teams for England and £97 million for the largest upgrade of National Resilience assets in almost twenty years; the next section has the details. On 14 August 2026 the Cabinet Office announced an emergency alert to phones across England and Wales that evening, telling people not to light anything that could start a fire, including barbecues, campfires and fireworks, and to call 999 for any fire; a temporary ban on the sale of disposable barbecues across Great Britain; around 100 military personnel in South Wales that day, with a further 100 to deploy that evening; emergency funding for the fire and rescue services facing the greatest operational pressures; and a national wildfire summit later in the year. It pointed to £97 million of existing investment in fire service training and specialist equipment, the same figure as in June, and said the Housing Secretary had written to councils in England reminding them of their powers to limit barbecues and open fires. Louise Haigh, the First Secretary, called the alert “the most extensive use of the UK’s Emergency Alert system in response to an active incident” (Cabinet Office, 14 August 2026). Our emergency alerts guide explains how they work and why to leave them on.

On 15 September two ministers gave evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: Baroness Blake of Leeds, the Minister for Building Safety, Fire and Resilience, and Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, a Defra minister. The committee’s chair, the Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael, said that “from 22 July to 14 August we did not have a fire Minister at all”; Baroness Blake replied that there had been “a change of Administration and a new Prime Minister coming in”. Jenny Riddell-Carpenter said “what we have in place now is not going to be fit for managing fires in 10 years’ time”, and: “We are working on an action plan at the moment. We will be moving that into the summit.” Baroness Blake said the government was “working towards a strategy through the action plan”, that the summit was expected “later in October”, and that aerial firefighting was “right at the top of the agenda” for it. Peter Lee said the aim was on-call aerial capability “in place ideally for the next summer”, and told MPs the wildfire assessment in the National Risk Register would be reviewed before the next wildfire season (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 15 September 2026).

The motion says: “The Government is belatedly convening a wildfire summit but has failed to publish a Wildfire Action Plan for England despite repeated warnings from fire and rescue services about escalating risk.” The factual part holds as at 24 September: England has no published wildfire action plan, and the summit has not yet met. The warnings are on record too: on 13 August the fire chiefs called for “a long-term wildfire strategy”, including a dedicated aerial firefighting capability (NFCC, 13 August 2026). What England does have is a four-page Wildfire Framework for England, published by the Home Office in December 2021, which “identifies responsibilities, clarifies relationships and facilitates coordination” across government and the main wildfire bodies (Home Office, December 2021). It describes itself as a first draft that the Home Office would review annually. Asked on 15 September whether that was still current policy, Peter Lee said “a lot of things have changed since 2021” and “we have moved on a lot in five years”, pointing to the strategy and action plan now being prepared. Scotland published its own wildfires strategic action plan on 5 March 2026 (Scottish Government), and Baroness Blake told the committee that the Welsh Government is organising its own summit. The motion also says: “One-off emergency measures must be replaced with sustained investment in prevention, resilience and a just transition.” Whether “belatedly” is fair, and whether a plan still being drafted amounts to a coherent one, is a judgement for voters; that the government acted in June and August, and has told Parliament what it is preparing, is a matter of record.

What the motion asks for, and what already exists

The motion asks the government to publish and fund a Wildfire Action Plan for England by spring 2027, to create a permanent, nationally deployable specialist wildfire capability, to require multi-agency wildfire plans in high-risk areas, to add £1 billion to the farming budget for prevention and land management, and to “Develop a wildfire danger-rating system along with proportionate temporary restrictions when risk is very high or extreme, such as on the use and sale of disposable barbecues and the use of fireworks.”

Some of that exists in part. Specialist wildfire teams already exist: on 20 June the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said teams hosted by fire and rescue services in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Northumberland, London and South Wales would be deployable to incidents across England by the end of June, with kit such as dedicated off-road vehicles from a wider £97 million investment in “the largest scale upgrade of National Resilience assets in almost twenty years” (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 20 June 2026). The fire chiefs welcomed the new capability, while saying continued investment would be needed, including for specialist equipment, trained personnel and aerial firefighting (NFCC, 30 July 2026). On 15 September Peter Lee told MPs that six specialist wildfire teams deployed in July had been fighting wildfires ever since, that National Resilience also has high-volume pumps that can move water long distances, and that the department had put some funding into drone capability at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service. Neither the June announcement nor the evidence to MPs said whether the teams are permanent, which is what the motion asks for.

On danger ratings, England and Wales already have the Met Office Fire Severity Index, and at its highest level it is used to suspend access to open-access land. In Scotland, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the Scottish Wildfire Forum issue wildfire warnings; on 29 April they warned of an extreme risk of wildfire across the whole of Scotland from 30 April (Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, 29 April 2026). Councils can limit barbecues and open fires with Public Spaces Protection Orders in public places, which the law defines as anywhere the public has access (Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, section 74); Peter Lee told the committee these can only be used on public land. The sale ban was made through statutory guidelines under the General Product Safety Regulations 2005 as they apply in Great Britain, enforced by the Office for Product Safety and Standards and local trading standards. They say disposable barbecues “must not be made available for sale either in store or online at the current time”, and that the guidelines will be withdrawn “as weather conditions change sufficiently to significantly reduce the risks”; they had not been withdrawn as at 24 September (Office for Product Safety and Standards, 14 August 2026). Asked whether ministers would consider a nationwide ban on such items when the risk returns, Baroness Blake said “all things are on the table”. What England does not yet have is a rating that triggers limits on selling or using barbecues and fireworks, or that triggers any restriction below its top level: the only restriction formally tied to the index is the suspension of open access rights at level 5, and the August sale ban was a single decision.

Four figures we could settle, and one we could not

The motion says “19 houses in Stourbridge were destroyed in August”. That is West Midlands Fire Service’s own figure. An update from the service at 3.28pm on 13 August said six properties were affected and put the fire at around 40 acres, including a wood. The next afternoon its Chief Fire Officer’s update said: “The fire spread rapidly and affected 37 properties. Of these, 19 were fully destroyed and a further 18 sustained damage.” It put the area at approximately 500 acres (West Midlands Fire Service, 13 and 14 August 2026). The smaller figures were early counts of the same incident, not a rival account. Investigators later found that the two fires behind it started accidentally, in fields where agricultural machinery was being used (West Midlands Fire Service, 26 August 2026).

The same line of the motion says the wildfire at Dunwich Heath “devastated 90% of its nationally important ancient heathland”. That is the figure we could not settle. The National Trust, which looks after the heath, says the fire started on 29 July and “has left little of the reserve untouched”, and that work is under way to assess the full site (National Trust, August 2026). We found no percentage in the Trust’s statements, so we have not been able to check the 90%.

The motion also says: “The Climate Change Committee’s May 2026 Report, ‘A Well Adapted UK’, warns that by 2050, the number of high fire risk days could double compared to the late-20th-century average and the wildfire season will extend into late summer and early autumn.” That is almost word for word what the report says. A Well-Adapted UK, the CCC’s fourth independent assessment of UK climate risk, published on 20 May 2026, sets out risks under 2°C of global warming by 2050 and says: “By 2050, the number of high fire risk days could double compared to late 20th century average and the wildfire season will extend into late summer and early autumn” (Climate Change Committee, 20 May 2026). It is in line with Met Office research from 2022, which projected a large increase in hazardous summer fire weather and found that at 2°C of global warming above 1850–1900 levels, days of “very high” fire danger would be twice as frequent as in the recent historical period (Perry and others, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 2022).

The motion also credits the Met Office with “five widespread heatwaves” and “40 days of temperatures above 30°C” in summer 2026. Both figures count spring and summer together. The wording closely matches a BBC Weather report of the Met Office’s summer figures: “It follows a spring and summer of persistent heat with five widespread heatwaves and 40 days of temperatures above 30C (86F), smashing the previous record of 34 days” (BBC Weather, 1 September 2026). The BBC’s figures appear under a chart credited to the BBC and the Met Office, and they set the 40 days against a previous record of 34, set in 1995. The Met Office said that by early August the number of days exceeding 30°C in 2026 was “already equalling the long-standing benchmark set in 1995 despite much of August and early autumn still lying ahead” (Met Office, 5 August 2026). Its count for June to August alone is 33 (Met Office, 4 September 2026).

The five heatwaves span late spring and summer too. The BBC counts one of them at the end of May, and the Met Office’s summer statement says the summer followed “a notable record-breaking heatwave in late spring”. The Met Office counted three widespread heatwaves by mid-July, two of them in the summer (Met Office, 16 July 2026). The fire chiefs counted the same way: on 8 July they said the UK was experiencing “its third heatwave since late May”, on 28 July they warned of “a potential fourth heatwave of the year”, and on 11 August of “a fifth heatwave this summer” (NFCC, 8 July, 28 July and 11 August 2026). “This summer” is common loose usage for a run of heat that began in late May, and the fire chiefs used it too; by the BBC’s own count, four of the five heatwaves fell in the meteorological summer, June to August. So on both figures the motion puts a spring-and-summer count on the summer. An Express report repeated the BBC’s sentence word for word on 15 September.

What it means for your household

For most homes, nothing about your own risk changed with this release; it is about national policy. The exposure is at the edge of built-up areas: Ordnance Survey says that is where the greatest proportion of fires have taken place in recent years, most of them small (Ordnance Survey, 12 August 2025). Wildfires are most likely in spring, when there is plenty of dead, dry vegetation after the winter, and the number peaks again in summer, particularly in southern England and during heatwaves and drought (Department for Transport and Met Office, October 2025). Most UK wildfires are caused by human activity (GOV.UK Prepare); West Midlands Fire Service found that the Stourbridge fires started accidentally, in fields where farm machinery was in use, and said on 26 August that investigations into the full circumstances were continuing. So the advice is about small things.

Between them, GOV.UK Prepare and the NFCC advise the following. Do not light fires in the countryside or other open spaces. Use barbecues only in designated areas and never leave a hot one unattended. Stub out cigarettes fully, take rubbish home, especially glass, follow local signage in dry spells, and never release sky lanterns. If you see a wildfire, move to a safe place and call 999 straight away rather than assuming someone else has, do not try to tackle it and do not travel to look; if you are told to leave or to stay indoors, do so. If smoke reaches your street, keep windows and doors closed and check the air quality tracker. Before a walk on open land in a dry spell, the Fire Severity Index for where you are going is on Natural England’s open access maps.

If you live in that edge strip, the preparation that pays is the ordinary kind: a written household emergency plan, a grab bag with medicines, documents and chargers in case you are asked to leave, and emergency alerts left on. Our heat-health alerts guide covers the same weather from the other side.

What not to do

Do not read the 1.8 million as a list of homes in danger; it is the number of homes within 100 metres of the edge of a built-up area, published a year before this summer. Do not buy equipment because of a headline; nothing in the official advice involves a purchase beyond what you would keep for any emergency.

Do not use a disposable barbecue on dry ground: the government’s guidelines say they cannot be considered safe in the current conditions. Use any barbecue only where it is permitted, and never light one in the countryside in a dry spell. Do not drive towards smoke to look; crews need the roads. And do not read the motion as a neutral audit: the Liberal Democrats are making a case for a policy, and its strongest parts rest on numbers the fire chiefs, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey published first.