Why your future home still won’t have air-con ...Middle East

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Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s The State We’re In. I’ve been in Japan for two weeks and have returned to see that the state of Britain is rather parched with three-quarters of England now in drought and a sixth summer heatwave looming.

Overheating homes and public buildings are fast becoming a major social and political problem in Britain.

Coming up in this week’s newsletter

While in Japan, I also experienced a heatwave. Temperatures did not go below 35°C while I was in Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto.

But, upon returning to Britain, I was forced to confront the reality of living in a country which, unlike Japan, is neither used to nor prepared for heatwaves.

While travelling around on the Shinkansen (the fact that Japan has high-speed rail and Britain can barely build a train track could be the subject of another newsletter) I saw homes and flats of all sizes with air conditioning units on their balconies, in their gardens or attached to their walls.

And yet, in Britain, fewer than 5 per cent of homes have air conditioning, and developers say only a small proportion of new homes are being built with it.

The implications of overheating homes (and schools and hospitals) are serious. The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) warned this week that new heat death figures from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) should be “a wake-up call on the need to tackle excess heat in homes”.

There were an estimated 2,877 heat-associated deaths during two notable periods of hot weather in England in May and June this year, almost double the figure reported annually for 2025, a UKHSA interim heat mortality monitoring report says.

And yet, developers, who ultimately decide whether new housing has air conditioning and climate control built in or not, blame regulations for the fact that you will see very few air conditioning units if you traverse Britain.

Is that true? Is red tape the reason for Britain’s lack of air-con? Can planning rules, once again, be blamed for a problem with our built world?

Forgive me for injecting some nuance into the conversation, but the answer is not straightforward.

Air conditioning as ‘last resort’

It is true that national building regulations introduced in 2021 under the Conservatives (when Reform defector Robert Jenrick was housing secretary) ask developers of new buildings to prioritise passive cooling strategies over air conditioning – which, as Dr Henry Dawson put it to me this week, is “a last resort”.

The planning rule in question is Approved Document Part O (Overheating) of the UK Building Regulations. It stipulates that passive cooling strategies, such as insulating walls and locating windows to maximise ventilation, should be prioritised. These rules do not preclude developers from building new housing that has air conditioning or climate control systems, like the ones found in many office buildings.

Dawson, who sits on the CIEH’s advisory panel and works as a senior lecturer and programme director for environmental health at Cardiff Metropolitan University, explained that there is good reason for this. He notes that air conditioning is “energy intensive” and can be costly.

Above that, Dawson notes, Britain may be warming up but this country is still one where winters can be very cold.

“We’ve also got properties that spend most of their time being too cold, and so you’d have to have heating and air conditioning,” he explains. “And if you’re relying on air conditioning to heat the property, it can be prohibitively expensive because it’s just the same as running a two-bar electric convector heater in order to try to heat your rooms up. It’s about one of the most expensive forms of heating you can get.”

As Britain faces down yet another heatwave in the knowledge that, later this year, we will be cold (and probably damp) again, our politicians and policymakers are looking at an enormous problem.

We do need to look at better cooling systems, such as air conditioning for public buildings like hospitals and schools. But, when it comes to housing, the regulations in place to compel developers to look at cooling measures are very recent. They were introduced less than five years ago.

This leaves an unknown number of relatively new homes, which have been built to be “energy efficient” and conserve heat, as I’ve reported from the very sweaty front lines (sofas) of our readers’ homes. One particularly bad example that haunts me is a converted office block in Croydon.

Labour won the 2024 general election with a landslide victory after promising to build 1.5 million new homes. They may not achieve that but, if they get anywhere close, it will be because they build blocks of new flats in urban centres. This type of building, in particular, will need proper cooling measures because south-facing, high-rise flats are exposed to sun throughout the day and, the higher up you are, the less appropriate opening windows can be.

Dawson says that air conditioning may be appropriate for these buildings but stresses that developers should be including measures such as “brise-soleil” – the shutter-style grids you see on new buildings (I saw many in Japan) which are designed to shade windows.

Similarly, on the Continent, you’ll see that most homes have shutters on the outside of their windows which can be pulled down during the day to stop light waves entering housing through windows and heating rooms up.

The heated debate (sorry) about whether it should be easier to install air-con in existing buildings as part of a retrofitting programme is not going anywhere. At the same time, calls for developers to include air conditioning in new homes are not going to quieten.

The problem politicians at both Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Miatta Fahnbulleh’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero face is that housebuilders are already facing a crunch because their costs have gone up with inflation and the housing market has stalled. Put simply, this means they will argue – with some legitimacy – that they cannot afford to take on more costs in an uncertain market.

What is unavoidable, however, is that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and the public health implications are serious. So, this issue needs to be taken seriously before more people become seriously unwell and find themselves in homes that are uninhabitable during warmer months.

Is your home or place of work overheating? I’d love to hear from you [email protected]

Housing crisis watch

It’s August and PM Andy Burnham is reportedly on holiday, so political announcements are few and far between after a busy start to his premiership. There is, however, some interesting news from Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan.

The number of affordable homes being built in the capital has gone up. New data from City Hall shows that the Greater London Authority (GLA) has started 14,335 homes over the 2021-26 programme so far. They say they started 9,145 home in the last year (2025/26) alone – a 168 per cent increase on from 2024/25.

Khan said of the figures: “Tackling London’s housing crisis has been one of my top priorities. We are doing all we can at City Hall, working with London boroughs, housing associations, developers and others to deliver more homes of all tenures.”

“Today’s figures show a tripling of affordable housing starts for the 2021-26 programme, including a sizeable increase in council housebuilding, compared to the same quarter last year. It’s clear that our programmes are delivering the affordable homes Londoners so desperately need, with a huge 367 per cent rise in completions.”

What I’ve been reading and listening to

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