UK PM Burnham Calls Emergency Meeting on Wildfires as Fifth Heatwave Hits, Urges Retailers to Pull Disposable BBQs

Since France's Perpignan wildfire forced 10,000 people out of their homes in early July, Britain's own fire and drought problem has kept building through a summer the Met Office now says is on track to be the UK's hottest on record.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer chaired an emergency Cobra committee meeting on Wednesday, August 12, the second one this year dealing with heatwaves, according to The Independent. The first came in June. This time the trigger was a fifth heatwave, wildfires burning across the south, north and Suffolk, and drought conditions the Environment Agency says now affect 45 million people.

The numbers back up why Downing Street called the meeting. England and Wales have recorded 1,017 wildfires so far in 2026, according to National Fire Chiefs Council data cited by The Independent. That already matches the record-breaking total for all of 2025, with roughly four months of the year still to go.

The headline development out of Wednesday's meeting is Starmer's public call for retailers to stop selling disposable barbecues. Speaking to reporters after the Cobra meeting, Starmer urged "all retailers big and small" to pull them from shelves, according to The Independent.

Earlier the same day, on a visit to Stevenage, Starmer had gone further in tone if not in policy, telling reporters a ban was "certainly going to consider," per The Guardian. He was direct about the reason: "The wildfires I mentioned, many of them have been created by disposable barbecues," Starmer said, naming the New Forest fire as a particular concern alongside blazes in northern England and Suffolk.

"I don't know yet what the remedy is, but I do want to leave the meeting today with a loud and clear message that we do want people to take the greatest possible care when they are out in the countryside, both in terms of cigarettes, but also those temporary barbecues that we know are causing risk of fires," Starmer said, according to The Guardian.

This is a request, not a mandate. No legislation has been announced, and Starmer stopped short of ordering retailers to act. Whether major chains like Tesco, Asda or B&Q actually comply voluntarily is an open question heading into the rest of the summer.

Met Office chief forecaster Chris Bulmer said temperatures were set to hit the mid-30s Celsius on Thursday, August 13, prompting an amber "extreme heat" warning for London, the South East, East Midlands, East of England, West Midlands and South Yorkshire, running from 9am to midnight, according to The Independent and thenational.scot. Wednesday itself was forecast to reach 33C, with Thursday's peak near 38C.

"While the peak heat will be more short-lived than recent heatwaves, temperatures widely into the mid-30s Celsius on Thursday brings the potential for impacts for some, which is why a Met Office warning has been issued," Bulmer said.

Starmer told reporters the extreme heat "could be with us for some weeks yet," according to The Independent, and said the country has already seen "a significant number of excess deaths from heat" this summer. He urged the public to check in on elderly friends and neighbors and follow UK Health Security Agency guidance, including drinking fluids and limiting exertion during peak heat hours.

Asked directly whether there was still a case for drilling the UK's remaining North Sea fossil fuel deposits given the climate impact clearly playing out in real time, Starmer sidestepped. "It is really important that we deal today with the situation that we are in right now," he said, adding that "the bigger questions obviously will come at the right moment in time," according to The Independent.

That answer will not satisfy critics on either side. The Green Party's Zack Polanski called for "concrete action," including "taxing fossil fuel giants," per The Independent's reporting on opposition reaction to the June Cobra meeting. The Liberal Democrats also welcomed the meeting but pushed for more. Neither party got a firm commitment from Starmer on drilling policy Wednesday, and it's a fair question whether a government facing back-to-back wildfire emergencies can keep deferring energy policy decisions tied directly to the crisis it's responding to.

While Downing Street debates barbecue bans and drilling policy, BBC News has been collecting practical coping tips from readers dealing with the fifth heatwave directly: taping foil emergency blankets over windows, freezing water bottles to cool fans, and in one case a Hitchin resident who rolled a kilogram of yogurt onto her windows after seeing a Loughborough University building-science experiment on reflective coatings.

The next test comes Thursday, when the amber extreme heat warning is in effect and temperatures are expected to peak near 38C across parts of the South East. Whether Wednesday's Cobra meeting produces an actual retailer commitment on disposable barbecues, or whether Starmer moves from asking to legislating, remains unresolved.