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# New heat law will protect Newham’s council tenants only
- URL: https://www.newhamcitizen.co.uk/new-heat-law-protect-newhams-council-tenants/
- Published: 2026-08-20T07:58:09.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T07:58:09.000Z
- Description: City Hall says failing to adapt could cost London up to £36bn a year by the 2050s
- Author: Newham Citizen

Newham’s council tenants will gain a legal right to a home that is not dangerously hot later this year. The thousands of residents who rent from private landlords, however, will not.

The change stems from Awaab’s Law, the housing legislation named after Awaab Ishak, the two-year-old who died in Rochdale in 2020 after prolonged exposure to mould in his family’s flat. Introduced in 2025, it requires social landlords to investigate and fix damp and mould within fixed timeframes. City Hall’s Heat Ready London plan confirms it will be extended to cover excess heat later in 2026\. However, the duty applies to the social rented sector only.

That leaves a gap in a borough where the private rented sector is among the largest in London, and where the housing most exposed to heat includes converted terraces and flats above shops. The evidence published today shows that the capital has “a high proportion of renters who have limited ability to adapt their home”.

**Exposure**

The confirmation sits within the Heat Ready London technical report, published today by the mayor of London and London Councils, which warns that climate change could cause damage worth up to £36 billion a year to London’s economy by the 2050s unless the capital adapts. Without further adaptation, that damage could reach the equivalent of three per cent of the city’s economy — between £16 billion and £36 billion a year. City Hall stresses the figure is not a bill, and covers climate impacts broadly rather than heat alone.

The plan identifies heat risk as greatest “in densely developed and deprived areas, where higher temperatures and lower capacity to adapt can worsen existing inequalities”.

Nor does the report treat overheating as a problem of new build. It notes that people spend more than 90 per cent of their time indoors, and that the highest-risk homes are identified through a combination of exposure and vulnerability: building type, but also occupants’ age, health, mobility and income. Around a million London homes may currently be at high risk of overheating, alongside 1,361 schools, 60 hospitals and 351 care homes in high heat-risk areas, though the report footnotes these as estimates requiring further work.

Retrofitting London’s most heat-exposed homes would need upfront investment of between £9 billion and £45 billion. There is currently no funding sufficient to cover this.

**Schools**

Around a fifth of Newham’s residents are under 16, making it London’s youngest borough. The report’s evidence shows that, of schools surveyed under the Greater London Authority’s Climate Resilient Schools Programme, 78 per cent said overheating had significantly affected pupils’ learning, productivity or behaviour, or otherwise disrupted school activity. One in four London schools closed during the 2022 heat. The plan lists retrofitting high-risk non-residential buildings that deliver essential public services, naming schools directly, as a priority area, with boroughs and central government as the delivery partners.

More broadly, 80 per cent of people reported discomfort in buildings during the 2022 heatwave.

**Warnings**

Evidence suggests Londoners aged between 45 and 65 face a higher risk of premature death in hot weather than people of the same age nationally, which the report attributes to urban factors including the heat island effect, housing and employment conditions.

London records an estimated 3,996 heat-related A&E attendances a year, around one and a half times the rate in other English regions, and UK-wide attendances and admissions could triple by 2050\. There were more than 300 excess deaths from high temperatures in each of 2020, 2023 and 2025, and the 2022 heat contributed to an estimated 387 premature deaths in London.

The conditions that raise risk are severe and common mental health conditions, neurological disorders, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In England in 2024, 38 per cent of heat-related deaths occurred in care homes, 36 per cent in hospitals and 27 per cent in people’s own homes.

**Canopy**

Newham has among the lowest tree canopy cover of any London borough, well below the capital-wide figure of 19.6 per cent, and the council has been planting for years to close the gap — 9,000 saplings in Beckton in 2019, 1,500 in Little Ilford in 2021, and more than 400 trees and hedgerows funded by a £297,000 Forestry Commission grant.

The economic case for greening is spelt out in the report. London’s existing parks and green spaces are estimated to deliver more than £90 billion in benefits over 30 years against costs of £3.3 billion, with greening measures given a benefit-cost ratio of between 5.6 and 27 to one. Shade structures, water provision and cool spaces are all described as “not well evidenced”.

Trees are themselves at risk. Higher temperatures, heatwaves and drought weaken trees, dry out soil and raise wildfire risk. Last year, London saw four official heatwaves and more than 120 wildfires, the highest rate since 2022.

**Infrastructure**

Transport for London lost £8.4 million in revenue during the July 2022 heatwave through delays and closures, and the report warns of cascading failures when transport depends on power, communications and water.

Energy demand rose six per cent across the UK during the 2022 heatwave — an extra 120GWh — and London’s cooling energy demand could more than double by 2050 on a business-as-usual path, at the same time as heat reduces the efficiency of the network. Thames Water estimates a potential shortfall of more than a billion litres a day by 2050 without further action.

**Delivery**

Newham was among the first councils to declare a climate emergency, in April 2019, and approved what it described as the UK’s first local authority Just Transition plan in December 2023, explicitly linking climate action to poverty, air quality and inequality.

Delivering the new priorities falls to a council transformed by May’s elections. Labour’s Forhad Hussain was elected mayor, but the authority is now split three ways — 26 Labour councillors, 24 Newham Independents and 16 Greens across 66 seats, down from 56 Labour seats. A multi-year adaptation programme requires a broader coalition than it would have a year ago.

Boroughs are named as delivery partners across most of the plan’s 37 priority areas: retrofit, outdoor shading, drinking water points and public toilets, tree cover, cool spaces, blue space access and wildfire risk management. Each borough runs a resilience forum within the London Resilience Partnership, which coordinates more than 170 organisations. One funding route is already in council hands — the plan proposes guidance on using the Disabled Facilities Grant, administered by boroughs, for work to reduce indoor overheating.

**Funding**

The wider funding picture is stark. Heat, the report says, is an emerging rather than established hazard, “the gap between action required and finance available is large”, and adaptation is “largely a public benefit with low financial returns”, meaning public support “will remain critical”.

Mete Coban, deputy mayor of London for environment and energy, said the technical report “gives us the evidence and clear priorities needed to accelerate action”, and that delivery “will require sustained investment and close collaboration across government, boroughs, businesses and communities”.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “The climate crisis is on our doorstep. It is already threatening Londoners’ lives, disrupting vital services and costing our economy hundreds of millions of pounds… We must create cooler homes and buildings, greener and shadier neighbourhoods, and infrastructure that can withstand a hotter climate.”