England has battled wildfires in recent months after the hottest summer on record (Alamy)
4 min read18 August
It wasn’t until wildfires affected the South of England that the issue started to receive the attention it deserves, the Labour MP who leads the Wildfires All-Party Parliamentary Group has said.
The MP for Scarborough and Whitby, Alison Hume, created the APPG after her northeastern constituency experienced the largest wildfire it had ever recorded last summer.
She told PoliticsHome that the lack of government action in response to that “devastating” incident had been “frustrating”, adding that the location of the fire – far from Westminster and the centre of the national media – played a part in the lack of attention.
“To be brutally honest with you, it’s because there’s been lots of wildfires in the South. It took two weeks to get any national coverage of the Fylingsdale Moor wildfire, and it was a massive fire that burnt for 40 days,” the Labour MP said.
“Since then we’ve had many more wildfires. It’s going to be on a lot more MPs’ radars, and I won’t be the only person standing up in the House of Commons talking about them, sadly.”
Extreme temperatures have resulted in wildfires across the country in recent weeks, including in southern areas such as Suffolk and the New Forest. The fires have damaged homes, businesses and environments in the constituencies of many MPs, leading Prime Minister Andy Burnham to describe the country as “tinderbox Britain”.
The scenes have led to a recent increase in public concern about climate change, according to Ipsos polling shared with PoliticsHome earlier this month.
“Wildfires are going to be part of our future going forward, as flooding is, and therefore we need to be much more resilient,” Hume added.
“We need to be planning, looking at land management ahead of these things, and then afterwards, what we do to help people recover.”
The Labour MP for Stourbridge, Cat Eccles, said wildfires in her Midlands constituency had left it feeling “almost like a war zone”. Wildfires in Stourbridge lasted days and destroyed 19 houses. Eccles told PoliticsHome that police officers were forced to break down doors and drag members of the public to safety.
Visiting Stourbridge on Friday, Burnham announced a temporary ban on the sale of disposable barbecues. Later that evening, a nationwide emergency alert warned people in England and Wales that there was a high risk of wildfires across the country and that the public “should not undertake any activity that could start a fire”.
Last week, the PM also announced funding for farmers to build on-farm reservoirs to help with future droughts and better access to water.
Speaking about the aftermath of the Fylingdales Moor/Langdale Forest fire last August, Hume said there had been a “massive gap” in the financial aid given to the community, after farmers lost equipment because they were on the front line fighting the fires. “Without them, there would have been not only loss of property, probably loss of life,” she said.
This year, the government has been “moving more decisively”, Hume added.
The APPG Chair wants the government to look at how the UK can learn from how other countries deal with wildfires, like how France and Spain fight fires from the sky: “We’ve got to improve our aerial capacity, there’s no doubt about that.”
She praised the government’s efforts to provide clearer leadership on wildfires, pointing to her recent calls with security minister Dan Jarvis and other Whitehall departments.
Speaking to PoliticsHome in his capacity as a constituency MP, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant said there have been several wildfires in his Rhondda and Ogmore constituency in recent years, but that the last fortnight has “felt different”.
Fellow Welsh Labour MP Ruth Jones, whose constituency of Newport West and Islwyn has suffered wildfires this summer, told PoliticsHome that she would like to see more education around the dangers of accidentally starting fires in hot and dry conditions.