LONDON: 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 (NAO) has 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.
“Parliament needs clear information on the resilience of infrastructure, service provision and finances to climate change, and on how these risks are being managed,” Gareth Davies, head of the NAO said yesterday. “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 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 resulted in damage to roads and railways, and left schools and hospitals dangerously hot this summer.
Concurrently, 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 to 2025.
Among the many impacts of overheating is the tendency toward more violence in prisons, the NAO report found. — Bloomberg
