A mother whose daughter suffered heat exhaustion after a day at nursery during this year’s record-breaking summer weather has urged Andy Burnham to prioritise future generations over drilling in the North Sea.
Joanna Groves, 31 from Bristol, was forced to call an ambulance after her four-year-old Ivy’s temperature soared to 38.7C during the second heatwave in June, just days before the mercury would peak at 38C in parts of the country.
“It [was] really scary. We were pretty worried,” she said, as Ivy was left lethargic and refusing to drink after a day at her nursery, which was later forced to temporarily close due to the extreme temperatures.
The mother-of-two has urged the prime minister to “prioritise the safety of vulnerable people, especially kids and to think about what they’re inheriting” as she attended a demonstration from Mothers Rise Up alongside a hundred more parents on Tuesday outside No 10 Downing Street.
“He’s got kids himself, so you’d hope that he’s having these same worries that we have,” she added.
The campaigners handed a letter in to No 10, signed by more than 28,000 people, urging Mr Burnham to adapt homes, schools and public infrastructure in line with recommendations from the Climate Change Committee’s A Well-Adapted UK report, invest more in affordable and renewable energy, and oppose new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.
The government is expected to give a go-ahead for the Jackdaw gas field off the coast of Aberdeen in a matter of weeks, it has been reported, despite concerns raised that its emissions could generate 36 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime, around 90 per cent of Scotland’s total emissions for 2023.
Ms Groves said that she was lucky Ivy was not hospitalised during the second heatwave, which saw the UK Health Security Agency issued a rare red heat-health alert for large parts of England across three days.
The UKHSA recorded 2,877 excess deaths caused by May and June heatwaves.
More than 1,000 UK schools closed for days or sent students home early in late June as the temperatures made them unsafe for children. Ms Groves’ nursery told parents that they’d worked hard to keep children hydrated and in the shade throughout the day, but was later forced to close due to the heat.
Mothers Rise Up told The Independent that now was the time to take action as the Met Office provisionally declared Summer 2026 the UK’s warmest on record, with a mean average temperature across June, July and August of 16.5C, beating the previous seasonal high of 16.1C set last year.
Maya Mailer, policy lead for the campaign group, said: “It’s only going to get hotter and we’re not set up for that as a country. We have the mindset of being in a cooler climate and our buildings trap heat.”
She said this summer was “so difficult for so many kids, teachers, patients, doctors, nurses, so we need to adapt our infrastructure” and that in order to address the root cause of the crisis, the government needed to commit to no new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.
“The government is about to make a decision on whether it will green light the huge Rosebank oil field, the largest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, and also the Jackdaw gas fields, and our view is that it would just be unimaginable to do that after such a summer.”
A Government spokesperson said: “The UK continues to be a world leader in tackling the climate crisis and we are acting to protect people and places from the impacts of climate change.
“We are investing in clean power, building nine new reservoirs and investing £10.5 billion by March 2036 to construct new flood and coastal erosion schemes, as extreme weather becomes more frequent”
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