Heatwave Response

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Thursday 21st July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, it would be helpful for the House to hear me read out again the points I made yesterday. I say to the Minister: yesterday’s scenes from Wellington, and other places, of homes and lives devasted are shocking and heartbreaking. As a former fire and safety Minister, I pay tribute—and I am sure the whole House will join me—to all our emergency services for their extraordinary efforts, especially the London Fire Brigade, which faced its most challenging day since the Blitz.

I hope that even those in this House who derided the concerns about extreme weather when we had the Statement on Thursday, with fond memories of the summer of 1976, will now recognise that the current events are very different. This week’s events in the UK and across Europe, when added to the previous extremes we have seen causing flooding and weeks of power supply problems, are a stark reminder that the climate emergency is real and pressing.

I am grateful to the Minister for responding in writing to my question about funding support for local resilience forums and confirming that this could be reviewed. However, given the damage and destruction we have seen—lives being devastated and the potential for it to happen again—will the Government commission a lessons-learned review on how local emergency services, LRFs and the Cabinet, which has been distracted by internal politics, can be better prepared? Can he make sure that the right funding is in place to ensure that, when these events occur, we are properly prepared at every level to respond to them?