How do we fix the housing crisis? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers share their experiences of the UK’s dysfunctional housing system and examine how we can fix it.
Ghost flats are becoming Britain’s new housing crisisAt 66 I’ve decided to rent for the rest of my life – homeownership is a trapThe ‘spinster’ housing crisis can no longer be ignoredPensioners like me have a moral responsibility to downsize for young peopleScowling, scolding pensioners owe young people the truth about housing
Your home may be cool now, but within a matter of months this will seem like a distant memory. Come summer, as many as eight in 10 UK households will be “uncomfortably warm”, a recent study suggests.
We’ve traditionally been much more interested in keeping our homes warm than keeping them cool. But that all changed after temperatures here hit 40°C for the first time in July 2022, something that would have seemed unimaginable even a few years before.
Then came two of the five hottest years on record in 2023 and 2024, followed by the warmest summer on record in 2025, when four heatwaves sent temperatures soaring. And the Met Office forecasts that 2026 will be one of the four hottest years on record worldwide, implying another sweltering summer for the UK.
As recently as 2011, less than one in five households in the UK said they felt “uncomfortably warm” in the summer. It is now more than four times that, according to a survey of 1,600 households by the University of East London.
Flats and overcrowded houses get particularly hot, especially those in cities. The Chartered Institution of Building Services says an acceptable summer indoor temperature is 25°C for the living room and 23°C for the bedroom. But as reporting by The i Paper has found, temperatures in the worst-affected homes can reach around 35°C, and potentially even higher.
Much of the problem lies with UK housing’s notoriously poor levels of insulation. This might seem counterintuitive, but just as a thermal flask keeps hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold, proper home insulation helps keep your house cool in summer as well as warm in winter. External wall and cavity wall insulation stop the building from getting hot in the first place, by trapping cooler air inside the house and slowing the transfer of heat from outside.
So, if you have the money – or can access a grant – new insulation is a great place to start. Insulating a three-bedroom semi-detached house in the UK can cost around £13,000 for wall, floor and loft insulation.
But there are also much cheaper and quicker ways to get the temperature down. Open windows to ventilate at night and first thing in the morning, and create cross-ventilation by opening windows on opposite sides of your home. This helps to remove stale, hot air and bring in a fresh breeze.
But it is crucial to close windows and curtains in the morning, especially in rooms that face the sun. That’s because heat from the sun becomes trapped in furniture, raising the temperature inside your home by up to 4°C. That’s the equivalent of having a 1kW or 2kW electric fire going, according to Loughborough University. To keep as much of this sun out as possible, it is a good idea to avoid dark curtains, which absorb and radiate heat, and go for light colours or reflective materials instead.
Much better still, however, would be to learn a trick or two from the Mediterranean countries, which for years have been battling the kinds of temperatures we are starting to see.
Travelling around Greece or southern Spain, one of the things you’ll notice is that they rely much more heavily than we do on shutters or awnings (as well as trees and recessed balconies), which block the sunlight before it enters.
While prices vary considerably, external shutters typically cost between £180 and £400 a window while an awning can cost between £300 and £4,000, according to MyBuilder, which links homeowners with tradespeople.
As Loughborough University “healthy buildings” expert Ben Richards explains, this is much more effective than drawing the curtains: “It’s like parking your car in the shade versus in full sun – the difference is huge.” External shading also means you’re less likely to need to keep your windows open at night.
Another thing you’ll notice driving around the Med is the sea of white buildings. White surfaces reflect sunlight rather than absorb it, and studies show that painting roofs white or adding some other type of reflective coating can reduce the internal temperatures by up to 4°C. It can even lower the surrounding outdoor temperatures by up to 2°C.
Inside the house, one cheap, easy and effective fix is to get a fan: they cost as little as 15p for 24 hours of continuous use. But there is one big proviso – if the indoor temperature is above 34°C, the fan becomes ineffective and may even make things worse by simply circulating hot air.
But experts are very clear that below 34°C, fans are a very cost-effective way to keep cool, using about 50 times less electricity than air-conditioning units.
The effect of a fan is intensified if you wet your skin, which mimics the powerful cooling effect of sweat evaporation, without the associated dehydration of using our own sweat.
You will have to pay for most of these measures you take to cool your home yourself, but there are grants available for some of the more expensive projects.
As announced in the November Budget, the Government is now offering a £2,500 discount on the cost of installing an air-to-air heat pump – a special type of heat pump that provides cool air in the summer as well as warmth in the winter. That will cover more than half the typical £4,500 cost of installing one.
There are also grants of £7,000 to £20,000 available to low-income households to help improve their energy efficiency through a range of measures, such as installing solar panels and putting in insulation. Unfortunately, the Government is scrapping this scheme – known as the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) and funded from household energy bills – in April as it looks to bring down those bills.
And as the climate continues to change, it will be poorer households that feel the heat most. According to the Resolution Foundation, 54 per cent of the poorest fifth of English families live in homes liable to get too hot, compared with 18 per cent in the richest fifth.
As much as we might try to cool our homes, the Government needs to take responsibility here too. Expanding support for insulation schemes and air conditioning or air-to-air heat pumps would be a start.
If the Government fails to grasp the severity of what’s coming, it will ensure that those least able to prepare for how climate change is transforming our lives will be most exposed to its effects.
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