A RECORD 1,350 wildfires were reported in the UK in 2026, prompting fire chiefs and climate advisers to warn that the country is not prepared for the risks that lay ahead.
Figures from the National Fire Chiefs Council, seen by BBC File on 4 Investigates, show this year’s total was more than 300 higher than in 2025 and over 1,000 above the figure for 2024. Records for reported wildfires were also broken in 2022 and 2025.
The rising numbers follow years of warnings about the conditions that can make fires more frequent. In 2012, the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) warned of “more frequent wildfires due to warmer and drier conditions”. The committee, established in 2008, has since told the government that the UK is “not prepared for the changing climate”, its chairwoman Baroness Brown said.
“The warnings have been there and not enough action has been taken,” she added. “I fear that lives will be lost. We need to be doing much more education and preparation.”
That preparation, Baroness Brown stressed, should include specialist firefighting teams and equipment, as well as “planning our woodlands, thinking about fire breaks” and setting up early warning systems. She believes that, by 2050, wildfire risk could double across much of the UK.
The scale of the threat is already clear to people whose homes have been destroyed. Sandy and Uttam Shiralkar are currently living in temporary accommodation after a wildfire engulfed their house in Stourbridge in August. Their home was one of 19 destroyed when fires started accidentally in fields where farm machinery was being used on the hottest day of the year.
“We saw the complete destruction of the house. There was no roof, no floorboards. Nothing. No-one should have this experience,” Sandy, a surgeon, explained.
Uttam said the loss had changed the shape of everyday life for the couple: “Every loss is painful, but losing a house has got a different dimension. Coming back to normality is going to take a long time.”
Alongside the growing fire risk, fire services are dealing with fewer staff. Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said more than a fifth of firefighter and control-room posts across the UK – about 12,000 jobs – had been cut since 2010. He said the reductions left crews dangerously overstretched over the summer.
“We had firefighters from London being mobilised to Yorkshire, firefighters from Merseyside being mobilised to Dorset,” he told the BBC.
“The effect, when you have wildfires happening at the same time across the UK, is there’s just not enough firefighters on the ground to be able to deal with them.”
The government says it is investing £97m in six specialist firefighting teams, dedicated off-road vehicles and other equipment. It describes the programme as the largest upgrade to national resilience in 20 years.
Phil Garrigan, chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council, welcomed the investment but said more funding was needed to strengthen aerial firefighting and provide crews with specialist equipment.
“The money has to be there, otherwise we’ll be going into 2027 and 2028 with a likely occurrence that we’ll see what we’ve seen in 2026, which is 50 plus homes lost and families devastated by the impacts of wildfire. We’ve got to get ahead of that.”
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