In the midst of a cold snap - a hot weather warning

• Met Office warns elderly may need summer aid• Winter payouts to 4 million cost £120m
Patrick Wintour
The Guardian, Thursday 8 January 2009

Local people are skating and sledging on frozen ponds in the fens near Earith, Cambridgeshire. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian
As temperatures stay stubbornly well below freezing, it may feel like the last issue on anyone's mind, but the government has been warned it may need to start thinking about introducing emergency hot weather payments to help poorer households keep cool.
The Department for Work and Pensions is studying a specially commissioned report from the Met Office which concludes that the weather may become so hot that Britain's poor and elderly people may need state help to pay their summer energy bills as they reach for air conditioners to prevent themselves dying from heat exhaustion.
The Met Office said yesterday: "We may be going through probably the coldest spell since 1996, but it is probably a bigger medium-term problem that we are going to see some very hot summers, of the kind we saw in 2003 and 2006."
The report was completed last year, the Met said, and was one of a number of studies undertaken, including for energy companies, so they could prepare for high summer energy demand fuelled by air conditioners.
The Met Office has argued that summers as hot as 2003 could happen every other year by 2050, as a result of climate change.
The 2003 heatwave led to the death of 15,000 people in France and there were 2,000 heat-related deaths in the UK.
In a report released last month on behalf of the World Meteorological Organisation, the Met Office said the global mean temperature for 2008 was 14.3C, making it the 10th warmest year since measurements began in 1850. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997 and global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2C warmer than the average for the decade 1990-1999.
A department spokesman said last night officials were studying the report, but had no plans to introduce hot weather payments at present.
That is just as well for Whitehall budgets after Gordon Brown in the autumn trebled cold weather payments from £8.50 to £25 a week for this winter. As of Monday, nearly 4m payouts had been triggered in 76 different areas, costing the government £120m, as weather stations recorded icy conditions. The payments are triggered when the temperature slides to freezing or below for seven consecutive days.