The Fire Next Door: Wildfire Risk No Longer Stops at the Edge of the Moor

Quick summary

• Wildfire risk now reaches London's edge, not just remote moorland, evidence to Parliament shows.

• Nearly 50,000 Greater London homes sit within 100 metres of wildfire-exposed land.

• Rainham's Arnold's Field fires show poorer communities bear the worst of this risk.

• Britain has no building standards or water capacity for fires at the town's edge.

"I don't want this to be the asbestos of tomorrow"

Sue Ospreay, now Mayor of Havering, said those words about a wildfire risk in Rainham, a corner of outer east London. She is no moorland gamekeeper.

Parliament's recent wildfire inquiry has heard a great deal this year about heather, peat and grouse moors, but it has also heard, repeatedly and in detail, that wildfire has stopped staying on the moor. It is arriving at the edge of Britain's towns and cities, and the country is not ready for it.

The numbers behind the headline

Ordnance Survey data submitted to the inquiry found that nearly 50,000 homes sit within 100 metres of the edges of Greater London, on land the London Assembly's Fire Committee calls "more exposed to wildfires".

Between 2022 and 2025, London recorded over 6,000 grass fires in its outer boroughs alone, three times the inner-London figure.

In July 2022, during a record UK heatwave, a wildfire tore through Wennington in East London and destroyed sixteen homes. The National Fire Chiefs Council told the Committee that fires like it are "increasingly occurring in areas that have traditionally not seen wildfire risk," in what it calls the rural-urban interface: the fringe where housing estates meet grassland, scrub and neglected open ground.

The Forestry Commission put it more plainly still: fire-resilient planning now has to run "from remote moorlands to green spaces within our cities," treating that seam as one connected risk rather than two separate problems.

A community that had already been failed

Nowhere in the evidence is that risk drawn more starkly than at Arnold's Field, a former landfill site in Rainham where illegal waste fires have broken out repeatedly.

The fires burn buried, decades-old rubbish rather than heath, and that is precisely the point Dr Rosie Knowles made to the Committee: "illegal waste fires at the urban fringe represent a distinct and under-examined category of wildfire risk, with specific and serious health consequences for communities".

Knowles is a geography researcher at the University of Liverpool who spent 2025 interviewing residents, councillors and the Environment Agency about the site.

The High Court designated the site contaminated land in October 2025. No action had been taken by the time of this submission. One resident's verdict on why was blunt: "If this was somewhere else, it would have been sorted out ages ago. Because it's a working-class community, and the political will wasn't there".

Havering Council's own submission confirms the pattern is structural. The Rainham area, it notes, "exhibits high levels of rural-urban interface as well as notable levels of flood risk," on ground riddled with at least 48 historic landfill sites. Wildfire is landing on communities already carrying every other environmental burden going.

Britain hasn't built for this

Even where the risk is understood, the infrastructure to meet it barely exists. The National Heat Risk Commission told the inquiry that the UK has "no wildland-urban interface (WUI) standards comparable to California, Australia or Mediterranean Europe": no ember-resistant construction, no defensible space around buildings, no vegetation rules for land next to high-risk ground.

It wants WUI standards written into planning policy and Building Regulations, a change that looks a long way off.

Water supply is another gap nobody has stress-tested. Professor Ivan Stoianov of Imperial College London was the independent expert witness appointed by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry to investigate water provision for firefighting, and he told the Committee its findings apply directly here, "including wildfires such as the July 2022 Wennington fire".

His verdict: the UK "does not measure the water used at fire incidents, does not flow-test fire hydrants," and is "alone among comparable countries" in setting no minimum pressure or flow rate for firefighting.

Peri-urban networks are built for household demand, "not for sustained firefighting flows," and their true capacity is "largely unverified," tested least of all in the heatwaves that also bring reservoirs down.

Mini Workgroups Ltd, a public safety software provider working with UK and US fire services, warned that Britain may be underestimating how fire behaves once it crosses into a built-up area.

A read-out from the Wennington fire suggests "structure to structure fire spread in the UK... may be more extensive and more rapid" than in the US, where housing sits further apart, though the firm flagged this as unproven: "whether this is actually the case remains a knowledge gap".

It was more definite about insurance: it pointed to the "post code lottery" withdrawal of cover already under way in the US, and warned that UK insurers following the same path, instead of rewarding home-hardening, is only a matter of time.

Where the Moorland Association stands

We are stepping outside our usual ground here, and deliberately so. These submissions come from a London borough, a fire committee, an academic and a software firm; not one moorland voice among them.

That is exactly why the evidence matters to our case. Strip away the postcodes and Arnold's Field and Fylingdales tell the same story: unmanaged land, smouldering rubbish or rank heather, building up the fuel that turns a spark into a disaster, and falling through the same gap between departments.

Wildfire is treated as either a rural land-management problem or an urban emergency-planning one, when it is really a single connected risk running from blanket bog to bin fires with no single owner. A strategy that regulates moorland burning while leaving the fringe unmapped, unbuilt-for and uninsured only covers half the risk it claims to manage.