Banning the Barbecue Won't Put the Fire Out
A thermometer reading of 38C and a prime minister standing in Stevenage talking about disposable grills is not, on the face of it, where anyone expected this government's first real test of the summer to land. But there Andy Burnham was, fresh out of his first Cobra meeting as PM, telling the country that people should not be using single-use barbecues "at this moment in time" while nearly three-quarters of England sits in official drought.
It is a strange kind of milestone. Not a budget, not a bill, not a set-piece speech—just a prime minister reaching for the smallest, most human-scale lever available to him and pulling it. And in fairness, it is not a bad lever to pull. Disposable barbecues have been implicated in enough recent blazes that several major retailers have already pulled them from shelves without waiting to be told. Councils from Brighton to Fylde have used public space protection orders to restrict them for years, backed by fines of up to £100 for anyone who ignores the ban. Burnham is not inventing a solution here so much as finally lending it national weight.
What's harder to pin down is what he actually announced. A ban on selling the things, or simply on using them? The prime minister left that question open, which matters more than it might sound. A sales restriction would put the burden on supermarkets and hardware chains, most of whom appear willing to comply already. A usage ban would put the burden on enforcement—on wardens, rangers and police patrolling parks and picnic spots in 38-degree heat, checking barbecues rather than putting out fires. Vagueness at the announcement stage is rarely accidental, but it does leave the policy floating somewhere between gesture and law until the detail arrives.
None of which is really the point, if you zoom out far enough. Crews responded to 393 wildfires across England and Wales in July, the busiest month fire services have ever recorded. That number was not produced by disposable barbecues alone. It was produced by grass so dry it ignites from a discarded cigarette, an overheated brake pad, or nothing anyone can later identify at all. Removing one ignition source from that equation is worth doing. It does not change the equation.
There is a pattern here worth naming, because it recurs in Westminster every time the weather does something unprecedented: reach for the object you can regulate, rather than the system you can't. A grill is a product. You can ban a product, tax it, put a warning label on it, watch retailers withdraw it from sale within a news cycle. A drought spanning most of two nations is not a product. It is the downstream consequence of reservoir levels, land drainage, decades of underinvestment in water infrastructure, and a climate that no longer behaves the way British summers used to. None of that fits neatly into a press conference in Stevenage.
To his credit, Burnham did not pretend otherwise. He framed the barbecue question as one small part of a Cobra session that also covered farmers facing crop and livestock stress, an NHS bracing for a second wave of heat-related admissions, and fire services already stretched thin by a record month. The Green Party's Zack Polanski has pushed for more publicly funded "cool spaces" and support for households to heatproof their homes—asks that go considerably further than anything on the table this week, and that the government has not yet said yes or no to.
That is where the real test sits, not in whether a specific brand of throwaway grill disappears from supermarket shelves by September. A government that treats this summer as a one-off inconvenience will keep having emergency Cobra meetings every time a heatwave arrives, each one slightly more dramatic than the last. A government that treats it as a preview of every summer from here on will need to talk about reservoirs, building standards, and public cooling infrastructure with the same urgency it has just found for disposable barbecues.
The grills can wait until autumn either way. The drought won't.