As climate change drives hotter summers, cooling is becoming a public health necessity, not a luxury.
For anyone looking for an answer to this question, the recent Climate Change Committee (CCC) report, titled A Well-Adapted UK and backed up by no less than 1,841 references, is essential reading. Among many other necessary recommendations, it highlights the importance of adapting existing homes to keep them cool in hot weather.
Air conditioning and the cooling hierarchy
How do we do this? Experts at Shade the UK are correct that we need to use a combination of ‘nature-based’, ‘passive design’, and ‘active ventilation and cooling’ measures in the right order. In this cooling hierarchy, a significant and often sufficient amount of cooling can be achieved by simple external shade and good insulation. However, passive measures will not always be sufficient. In some homes, active cooling such as air conditioning (AC) will be needed.
Until recently, we haven’t had a good idea of how much active cooling we might actually need, or how many people currently have AC.
Now, we have a much better indication. According to a recent academic study, published in June of this year, estimates of present-day AC use across the UK vary widely, with figures ranging from 3 per cent to 19 per cent of homes.
Although future trends are uncertain, one conclusion this study comes to is that previous official assumptions about AC uptake “are too narrow, and present ownership is potentially an order of magnitude higher.”
Cooling is also becoming an issue of inequality. As with all energy services, AC ownership and use is fundamentally unequal. Recent evidence shows that some people who are at the most risk from heat in the UK, including older adults, low-income households and many social housing tenants, are less likely to have and use AC. As a result, the side of energy poverty long experienced elsewhere in Europe – summer cooling – has landed in the UK.
Leaving aside the upfront purchase cost, in what follows we want to focus more on the running cost issue. A small AC unit using roughly 1kW for seven hours per day over 30 days would cost around £54.83 in electricity. That might not seem like much, but for those on the lowest incomes, it absolutely is.
A Hot Weather Payment?
In what you might call classical UK fuel poverty policy, energy affordability is driven by three factors: energy prices, the energy efficiency of the home, and low household incomes. The same factors will shape the affordability of running AC and other active cooling measures.
It follows that policy interventions might be required to support lower-income and heat-vulnerable households with the costs of running AC in summer, and especially during heatwaves, when they will be needed most.
One option is for the Government to start thinking about a Hot Weather Payment. This could mirror the current design of the Cold Weather Payment, with some improvements based on previous learnings. The objective would ultimately be to reduce heat-related mortality and morbidity during hot weather.
For example, eligible households could receive a payment for each period of hot weather between 1 May and 31 October. The trigger for this payment could be based on temperature, like the Cold Weather Payment. Another possibility would be to link payments directly to Heat-Health Alerts, ensuring that financial support is automatically triggered when dangerous temperatures are forecast.
Any Hot Weather Payment system would need to make payments in advance of a heatwave, and would also need an eligibility criterion that effectively targets those on low-incomes and most vulnerable to heat-related mortality and morbidity.
To be balanced, there might be alternative ways of achieving the same outcome as a Hot Weather Payment. The CCC is right, but perhaps a little optimistic, to suggest that our future energy system could have enough clean, cheap electricity to make this problem go away without direct financial support. Homes with solar PV could also feasibly generate enough electricity to power an AC unit.
However, we would be wise not to rely on renewable electricity generation and wider energy system reform to meet the potential costs of keeping cool in the more regular 40°C summers of the future.
22 per cent of homes will need AC
Astute readers might have realised that earlier we wrote that until recently we haven’t had a good idea of how much active cooling we might actually need. But now we have estimates of this too.
The recent CCC report states that in future climate conditions of 2°C global warming – which is around what we are heading for – approximately 22 per cent of UK homes will require active cooling, like AC, to cope with overheating. Under more drastic warming scenarios, which are still not impossible, active cooling is required for almost every single home in England.
The exact level of warming we hit is still subject to choices made by us all. But if we assume a minimum of 22 per cent of UK homes will need AC, and that many of these will be lower-income households and/or particularly vulnerable to heat-related harm, the question of how these households will afford to run their AC units when they need to becomes inescapable.
A Hot Weather Payment might not be the best solution. Wider electrification, solar PV, battery storage, and smarter electricity tariffs could instead reduce cooling costs over time. Either way, the time to begin that conversation has clearly come.
Further reading
You can find original research from Matthew Scott at the Chartered Institute of Housing and Mehri Khosravi at the University of East London below:
From building codes to behaviour: Strengthening extreme heat adaptation policy in the United Kingdom – May 2026
Heat Adaptation in the UK: Policy Brief – October 2025
A nation unprepared: Extreme heat and the need for adaptation in the United Kingdom – June 2025
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