The government has imposed an emergency disposable BBQ wildfire ban, prohibiting the sale of disposable barbecues in Great Britain both in shops and online, as drought and heatwave conditions push fire services across England and Wales to the limit.
The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) said the devices ‘cannot be considered a safe product’ in the current conditions and ‘must not be made available for sale either in store or online at the current time’. DBIST said disposable barbecues have been the cause of ‘a number of serious wildfires across the country over the summer months’. All retailers are to receive guidance about the change, Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC.
Burnham warns Britain is a ‘tinderbox’
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Matt Chorley, Burnham put the scale of the crisis in plain terms. ‘We’ve got 37 fires across England and Wales right now, four of them are major incidents,’ he said. Fire crews in the West Midlands were battling multiple blazes for a second day as the prime minister visited Stourbridge to see the impact of a devastating fire there.
‘We’re going into a difficult weekend, please just think about the situation that we’re in,’ Burnham said. ‘Britain is a tinderbox right now. Setting a fire in any outdoor setting of any kind is a risk to other people’s homes, it’s a risk to other people’s lives, don’t do it, please don’t do it.’
He also said some of the wildfires burning across the country will have been started by disposable barbecues. As parts of the UK recorded the hottest day of the year on Thursday, residents fled their homes as fires spread through dry grass and tore through houses. West Midlands Ambulance Service said it treated 54 casualties at eight different fires across the region, with 19 people taken to hospital.
The ban was first discussed at an emergency Cobra meeting on the government’s response to record temperatures earlier this week.
What the disposable BBQ wildfire ban means in practice
The prohibition applies across Great Britain and covers both physical retail and online sales. According to the British Retail Consortium, the Office for Product Safety and Standards confirmed to the BRC that the ban is intended to be temporary, but no end date has yet been set, as it will depend on ongoing weather conditions.
Many large retailers and supermarkets had already voluntarily stopped selling disposable barbecues under a framework agreed in 2023 between fire chiefs and the British Retail Consortium. That framework said retailers should suspend sales once an extreme heat event has been declared as imminent, or in response to ‘reasonable, evidence based’ requests from local councils. The new government direction goes further, making the suspension mandatory across all retailers.
Some local councils had already moved ahead of any national measure. According to The Independent, councils including Brighton and Hove and Islington had already banned the use of disposable barbecues in parks, beaches and open spaces. The New Forest in Hampshire had also been designated a barbecue-free zone because of fire risk. The national ban now brings the rest of Great Britain in line with those local restrictions, at least for the duration of the current conditions.
Burnham also said he planned to commission firefighting planes, like those used in Europe and the United States, to combat the spread of wildfires. The country has to ‘face up’ to the ‘changing climate’ and needs to transition to ‘more clean energy’, he said. Plans were also being drawn up for emergency financial support for fire services battling the blazes.
‘We have a fire and rescue service across the country that isn’t properly set up to deal with these incidents,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the capability in the way that we should have to fight these fires. There’s thousands of firefighters out there today doing back-breaking work, in full kit, in the most difficult conditions.’
BBC reported that Burnham said the ban would be kept under review, with no return to sales until conditions ease. The government’s advice, published by DBIST, remains in force across Great Britain until further notice.
