As France scrambles to close schools under a rare red heat alert, the European Union’s crisis management experts have pointed across the Channel with grudging admiration. Their praise? For Britain’s decidedly unglamorous, market-based approach to heatwave resilience. Paris may have Bastille Day fireworks, but London has a functioning capital market for air conditioning units.
The headlines from France are stark: temperatures topping 40°C, the education ministry shuttering schools, and hospitals braced for a surge in heat-related admissions. The government has wheeled out the usual arsenal of emergency measures. But it is a reactive, costly, and distinctly inefficient response. It smacks of central planning under duress, the very thing that gave us the NHS’s worst waiting lists.
Contrast this with the British model, which the EU’s own disaster prevention chief called “exemplary” in a leaked memo. No, we do not have a centrally mandated “cooling strategy” or a minister for sunblock. What we have is a dynamic price mechanism. During the 2022 heatwave, the spot price for portable air conditioning units surged 30 per cent on Amazon UK within 48 hours. Suppliers rushed stock from warehouses in the North, and delivery vans orchestrated a logistical ballet that would make DHL blush. Within days, supply met demand. Not a single school closed in England. The market cleared.
This is the beauty of a system that trusts individuals and businesses to respond to price signals rather than waiting for a government diktat. The French model, by contrast, is like a state-owned utility: it hesitates, it consults, it spends billions on cooling centres that are often empty because people prefer to suffer in their own homes.
Critics will bleat about inequality: that the wealthy can afford air conditioning while the poor bake. To which I say: look at the alternative. In France, even the wealthy cannot buy a unit because the government has imposed a price cap on essential cooling equipment to prevent “profiteering”. The result is shortages for everyone. In Britain, the poor may pay more, but at least they can buy one. And the government’s role? It steps back. It ensures the regulatory framework for efficient supply chains. It does not get in the way.
The UK’s heatwave resilience is not about state largesse. It is about fiscal restraint. The Treasury’s prudent management of debt means that when a crisis hits, gilt yields do not spike. Compare that to France, where the cost of borrowing has soared amid worries over its ballooning deficit. Jacques Attali, the veteran French economist, observed last week that “the British have learned that you cannot spend your way out of a heatwave; you must let prices do the work.”
Of course, the EU’s praise comes with a dose of envy. The bloc’s green agenda has strangled investment in new gas-fired power plants, leaving the grid vulnerable when solar generation dips. Britain, with its pragmatic mix of renewables and gas, has kept the lights on and the air conditioners humming.
So while French schoolchildren sweat it out at home, British pupils sit in air-conditioned classrooms. The lesson is clear: the invisible hand cools better than any government directive. And the market, not the march of the state, is our best defence against the elements.