Pardon the pun, but which bright spark thought of that? The wildfire alert frightened the pants off the public – to coin a Covid-era phrase – thus drawing attention to the government’s woeful lack of preparedness for this dreadful hot weather.
From an administration that has enshrined Net Zero, it’s all a bit rich. These are the same people who have invested huge amounts of literal and political capital in preparing us for global warming, and they have been taken by surprise by the weather heating up.
From Israel to Australia, countries regularly facing the threat of fires have amassed aircraft, specialist ground units, surveillance, command-and-control, vegetation management guidelines and surge capacity. What was preventing Britain following suit as it heated up?
The parlous state of our economy combined with sheer incompetence, that’s what. Speaking of which, let’s return to those fire services for a moment. In March 2025, England had 30,601 full-time-equivalent firemen. Ten years earlier, however, it had 35,699, a fall of 14 per cent.
Among on-call fire crews, the drop was steeper still, at 26 per cent. Nor is this ancient history. Between 2020 and 2025 alone, the total fell by a further 4.1 per cent.
This isn’t a party political point: the further back you go, the worse it looks. Numbers of firemen in England are roughly 41 per cent lower than in 2009. The National Audit Office found that in the five years from 2010-11, the spending power of stand-alone fire authorities fell by an average of 17 per cent in real terms, while the money handed to them by central government fell by 28 per cent.
To make matters worse, over the decade to March 2025, as numbers of firemen fell precipitously, the number of emergency incidents they dealt with rose by 22 per cent. Partly, this is because the fire service has quietly become the emergency responder of last resort for a country that has run out of anybody else to send.
Meanwhile, response times to serious fires have lengthened. The Fire Brigades Union has argued that the service now needs thousands more firefighters as wildfires and other risks increase. You think?
Then there’s the state of our Armed Forces. Anybody regretting those defence cuts yet? Just thank your lucky stars that it’s wildfires that are highlighting the thinness in our defences rather than an attack by Russia.
With the fire services overstretched, the last line of defence has been invoked, only for us to discover that there are rather fewer troops than would be ideal (as I have noted before, our entire armed forces could be accommodated within Wembley Stadium with 17,000 seats to spare).
Was all this really wise? As a symptom of Britain’s complacency, which has seen soaring levels of taxation matching eyewatering expenditure on the luxury of welfare for all, it couldn’t be starker. And there’s Andy Burnham investing badly-needed public funds on moving illegal migrants to middle class areas.
Our priorities are all wrong, and they have been wrong for a long time. Those sirens were alarming to millions of Britons, but they should really have been a wake-up call for the government to get serious before it’s too late.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.