As the UK swelters through its fifth heatwave of the summer with temperatures hitting up to 38°C, one simple hack could help you sleep cool at night.

Britain is enduring its fifth heatwave of the summer, with temperatures forecast to climb as high as 38°C. Amber “extreme heat” warnings are in place across 12 counties, including London, the South East, East Midlands, East of England, West Midlands, and South Yorkshire.

These warnings run from 9am on Tuesday (August 11) to midnight on Thursday (August 13).

The Met Office expects temperatures to reach 33°C on Wednesday, rising to 37°C or 38°C on Thursday. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has also issued amber heat health alerts across every region of the UK, valid from 9am on Tuesday (August 11) to 9pm on Friday (August 14).

While the hot weather is great for sunbathing or a trip to the seaside, it makes sleeping much harder.

During a heatwave, bedrooms can quickly become stuffy and uncomfortable. Fans often just push warm air around rather than cooling the room, and while opening windows in the evening can help, noise or security concerns mean many people can’t leave them open overnight.

Living in the South-East, I’ve found the heat relentless this summer. Even with a fan aimed directly at me, I’d often wake up drenched in sweat.

I plan to get air conditioning next year, but this summer I needed a cheaper fix. I decided to try stick-on blackout blinds with a UV-resistant coating and reflective backing to deflect sunlight from my windows.

Some people use tinfoil on their windows for the same effect, but I found it messy and worried it might damage my double-glazed windows.

Blackout blinds are mainly designed to block light, but they can also help keep a room cooler.

According to Broadview Shading Solutions: “Blackout blinds can reduce solar gain – the process by which sunlight heats up a room – by blocking direct sunlight from entering through the window.”

They work best when kept closed during the hottest parts of the day.

Traditional blackout blinds work just as well, but can be costly, especially for larger or awkward-shaped windows.

I first bought the stick-on blinds to block out early-morning light, but they’ve turned out to be great for keeping my bedroom cooler, too.

Priced at just £13.80 on Amazon, they come in a range of sizes and can be trimmed to fit any window.

They attach using sticky-backed velcro on both the frame and the blind, with the reflective side facing outwards.

In the evening, once it cools down, I take the blinds off and open the windows to let fresh air in. Before bed, I close the windows to cut out noise and put the blinds back up so the early morning sun doesn’t wake me.

The only downside is a darker bedroom during the day, but it’s a small price to pay for a cooler night’s sleep.

By CAROLINE PEACOCK, SHOWBUSINESS REPORTER

Published: 21:44 BST, 12 August 2026 | Updated: 04:35 BST, 13 August 2026

Jeremy Clarkson has moaned that he couldn’t see the solar eclipse from his home in the Cotswolds.

The Clarkson’s Farm star, 66, was one of millions who headed out to catch a glimpse of the rare astronomical event on Wednesday night.

The event saw the moon gradually slide across the face of the sun until it covered up to 96 per cent, with some parts of the country falling into complete darkness.

But as many sky watchers took to social media to share their incredible snaps of the eclipse, Jeremy found viewing it harder than it seemed.

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Posting a snap of a bright white blob of the sun across his fields, he penned: ‘So annoying. We didn’t get the eclipse in Chipping Norton.’

The next chance to see an eclipse this deep won’t come to the UK until 2050, and you’ll have to wait until 2090 for the next totality.

Jeremy Clarkson has moaned that he couldn’t see the solar eclipse from his home in the Cotswolds

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As many sky watchers took to social media to share their incredible snaps of the eclipse, Jeremy found viewing it harder than it seemed

It comes just days after Jeremy said the harvest at his Diddly Squat Farm is ‘f*****’ as the country prepared for the year’s fifth heatwave.

He posted a screenshot of the BBC weather forecast for Chipping Norton to Instagram on Sunday afternoon with the caption: ‘Harvest already f*****. May as well just enjoy it now.’

The forecast for the Oxfordshire village – near to where the former Top Gear presenter owns the land made famous by the Amazon Prime series Clarkson’s Farm – showed a high of 29C on Sunday.

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Chipping Norton is set to endure heat of up to 33C this week as Britain faces a fifth heatwave of the year, while temperatures could reach 36C in parts of East Anglia and the South East.

His farming show, which has been filming for a sixth series in recent months, has featured candid reflection on the difficult realities of British farming and will likely focus on the impact of this year’s hot weather.

Last week the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned the Government that Britain could face food shortages because of the long warm and dry spell.

Tom Bradshaw, the NFU’s president, said low rainfall and record-breaking heatwaves which have dried soil could lead to fewer products on supermarket shelves.

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He told BBC Radio 4 that the Prime Minister should give farmers tax breaks for water storage systems on their land to prepare for future hot weather.

The solar eclipse seen next to Big Ben, London

It comes just days after Jeremy said the harvest at his Diddly Squat Farm is ‘f*****’ as the country prepared for the year’s fifth heatwave

Tom said: ‘Those other countries around the world that we currently rely on to produce our food and vegetables, their climates are changing as well.

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‘It does feel like there is going to be shortages of [food] products.

British farmers had already been hit by winter flooding this season, which affected planting, before drought and hosepipe bans compounded their woes in recent weeks.

England and Wales saw their driest July ever recorded, with some counties seeing 1mm or less of rainfall across the entire month, the Met Office said.

Wheat farmers have said their crop is half its normal height and England is experiencing its earliest-ever harvest as farmers bid to salvage their lacklustre yields.

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Jeremy’s 1,000-acre farm has previously produced traditional crops including wheat, barley and rapeseed alongside potatoes, mustard and clover.

But he said in July he had deliberately left 200 acres uncropped this year because planting wheat or barley would have guaranteed financial losses.

He warned it was becoming ‘quite simply impossible’ to make money from growing food and warned more farmers could be left with little choice but to use their land for other means.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — U.S. immigration officials said Wednesday that they didn’t publicly disclose the death of a Guatemalan man who had a seizure at a New Jersey detention center because they weren’t notified that he died after they sent him to the hospital.

Jose Chajon-Raxon had the seizure July 19, a day after being processed into Delaney Hall, a privately run immigration jail in Newark, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. DHS officials said Chajon-Raxon was “taken to the hospital and released from ICE custody on July 22.”

The department didn’t say what happened after he went to the hospital, when he died, or whether he was released from the hospital before his death.

“Per ICE policy, when an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for monitoring or reviewing deaths that may occur. This is common sense,” the DHS statement said.

This is part of a policy change announced earlier this year in which the agency no longer reports deaths that occur within 30 days of someone’s release from custody. The move rescinds a 2021 policy implemented by the Biden administration.

U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who has routinely visited Delaney Hall, said the policy change creates a “loophole” where the agency can release someone from its custody and then “claim it has no responsibility to investigate their death or inform Congress and the public.”

“ICE — consistent with the entire ethos of the Trump Administration — is dead set on avoiding public scrutiny and taking any accountability for its failures,” he said.

DHS said in the statement that ICE “remains committed to transparency regarding detainee deaths.”

Chajon-Raxon’s death first became publicly known when it was disclosed by Menendez last week following the death of another detainee in early August.

He told reporters that ICE granted the person a “discretionary release” from custody after they were taken to a hospital and lost consciousness, and the person died shortly afterward. At the time, he did not identify the person.

In recent months, Delaney Hall has been the site of fierce protests by immigration advocates, with demonstrators at times attempting to block vehicles from entering or leaving the facility. Earlier this year, some people held at the jail launched a hunger strike over the conditions, according to Cosecha, an immigrant advocacy group.

The facility is owned by Geo Group, a private prison contractor that operates multiple detention centers across the country. The contractor didn’t not immediately respond to email from The Associated Press requesting comment.

Don’t boil from cold water

Most Italians agreed that it was a cardinal sin to place pasta in cold water before boiling it.

Still, there are cold water truthers out there

Most major UK supermarkets have suspended sales of disposable barbecues in recent weeks

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The Prime Minister has urged retailers to withdraw disposable barbecues from sale following a high-level emergency meeting about the number of wildfires the UK has dealt with this summer.

Andy Burnham urged “all retailers big and small” to pull the barbecues from their shelves as he warned extreme heat conditions “could be with us for some weeks yet”. The Government’s emergency Cobra committee held a meeting earlier on Wednesday in response to the prolonged spell of exceptionally hot and dry weather.

England and Wales have already seen as many wildfires this year as in the whole of 2025. Some 1,017 wildfires have been recorded in England and Wales this year, according to data shared by the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), the same as last year’s record-breaking total.

Most major UK supermarkets have suspended sales of disposable barbecues in recent weeks in line with voluntary guidance from the NFCC. Mr Burnham urged all shops to stop selling them and indicated that an outright ban could be considered in future summers.

He said: “The big risk in terms of risk to the wider regions across the country is the risk of wildfires. What we are seeing is multiple serious incidents across the country.

“Fire services, by and large, are supporting each other through mutual aid to deal with those incidents but we are keeping a very close watching brief on them. There is advice to the public here not to use disposable barbecues.

“We have today confirmed through the National Fire Chiefs Council that the framework restricting the retail sale of those disposable barbecues is being extended. Now I would ask all retailers big and small to adhere to that framework.

“Longer term we will look at whether a temporary ban in the summer months is justified.”

The Prime Minister said there had been a “significant number of excess deaths from heat this summer already” and urged the public to follow health advice, including checking in on elderly friends and relatives.

Asked if there was still a case for drilling the outstanding North Sea fossil fuel deposits given the impact of climate change, Mr Burnham replied: “It is really important that we deal today with the situation that we are in right now and we focus on making sure that we have the serious incidents under control across the country, and those incidents are under control.”

He later said: “The bigger questions obviously will come at the right moment in time. But I have said that we have had it all but confirmed that this is the hottest summer on record, and as we go through it, we need to realise that these conditions could be with us for some weeks yet.

“There is some rain forecast, but not necessarily rain that will change the situation fundamentally. So we are looking at a dry prospect going forward.”

Fire chiefs warned the prolonged dry spell and the high heat had turned parts of the country into a “tinderbox”.

NFCC chairman Phil Garrigan told PA: “Most wildfires in the UK are caused because of human behaviours, careless, accidental or unfortunately intentional acts. But as climate change brings more frequent periods of hot, dry weather, the conditions for wildfires are becoming more dangerous, increasing their scale and intensity.

“Hot, dry weather and drought are turning parts of the UK into tinderbox landscapes, allowing fires to spread faster, burn longer and place greater pressure on fire and rescue services.”

Nearly three-quarters of England and the whole of Wales are in drought, heaping pressure on water resources for households, agriculture and the environment, and temperatures are expected to climb as high as 38C in some parts of England on Thursday.

A key climate adviser has warned it “gets worse from here” until the greenhouse gas emissions – mostly caused by burning fossil fuels in power plants, vehicles, home heating and industry – behind global warming are cut to zero overall, known as net zero.

Baroness Brown, who chairs the independent advisory Climate Change Committee’s adaptation work, told PA: “We need to remember that this is as good as it gets. It gets worse from here. Until we get to net zero, things go on getting worse.”

She also urged the Government to take steps to help the UK adapt to rising temperatures, such as air conditioning in hospitals, schools and for vulnerable families.

In the latest heatwave, rare amber “extreme heat” warnings have been issued by the Met Office for London and parts of the South East, East Midlands, East of England, West Midlands and South Yorkshire from 9am to midnight on Thursday.

Southern Water has applied for a rare drought order which would ban businesses from non-essential water use, including cleaning cars and filling non-domestic swimming pools, saying an “exceptional” lack of rain has threatened supplies in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

It warned that 165,000 people in the Southampton West supply area could face restricted supplies. Environment Secretary Angela Eagle will decide on the application, which would be the first such ban since May 2006.

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“Have another drink.” It can become a familiar refrain for parents during a heatwave, particularly when a child is busy playing and has little interest in stopping for a glass of water.

Keeping up fluid intake becomes more important as temperatures rise because heat increases water loss, particularly through sweating. But a child’s fluid intake does not have to come solely from a cup or water bottle – the water in food also counts.

That contribution can be substantial. An analysis of Australian dietary data found that moisture in food supplied 29% of total water intake among children and adolescents. And research involving children aged four to ten found that those who ate more fruit and vegetables tended to have better measures of hydration.

Water-rich foods should supplement regular drinks rather than replace them. But if getting children to drink enough feels like a battle, food can provide another way of adding fluid to their day.

Here are five options.

1. Watermelon and other juicy fruits

Many fruits and vegetables are around 90% water, which is why foods such as watermelon, strawberries, oranges, peaches and melon can contribute to fluid intake.

There is child-specific evidence for this. In a study of 442 children aged four to ten, solid fruit and vegetables provided around 12% of their total water intake. Children who ate more fruit and vegetables also had better measures of hydration.

So offering watermelon, berries or sliced fruit during hot weather provides another source of water alongside regular drinks.

2. Homemade ice lollies

If repeatedly offering a drink is getting you nowhere, changing how it is served may help.

Reusable ice-lolly moulds can be filled with milk, yoghurt, blended fruit or diluted fruit juice. Water consumed through foods and other fluids still contributes to total water intake, so a homemade lolly offers another way to provide fluid.

Making them yourself also gives you control over the ingredients. Although homemade lollies are not automatically healthier, you can choose what goes into each lolly, making it easier to create lower-sugar versions while also involving children in deciding which combinations they would like to try.

3. Cucumber, tomatoes and peppers

Fruit may be the obvious choice when you think about juicy foods, but vegetables can contribute to water intake too.

Cucumber has a particularly high water content, while many other vegetables also contain a large proportion of water. More importantly, research in children has directly linked greater fruit and vegetable consumption with higher water intake and better hydration.

Cucumber, tomatoes or pepper strips can be served alone or alongside familiar foods such as hummus or cream cheese. They also work well in lunchboxes and snack plates when nobody particularly wants to cook or eat a large hot meal.

4. Yoghurt, milk and dairy foods

Fruit and vegetables are not the only foods that can add fluid to the diet. Milk and dairy products also contribute to children’s overall intake of water and nutrients.

In British children, yoghurt consumption has been associated with higher intakes of nutrients including calcium, iodine and riboflavin. The study was observational, so it cannot show that eating yoghurt caused those differences, but it demonstrates that yoghurt can fit into a nutrient-rich diet.

Yoghurt can be eaten cold with fruit, blended into a smoothie or frozen into a lolly. Milk can also contribute directly to fluid intake, and research comparing different drinks has shown that milk can support fluid balance.

Fortified dairy alternatives are another option, although their nutritional composition varies between products.

5. Build a hydrating ‘picky tea’

You do not have to serve each water-rich food separately. A snack-style meal can bring several together.

A plate could contain melon or berries, cucumber and pepper sticks, yoghurt, cheese, hummus and bread or crackers. Fruit, vegetables and other moisture-containing foods can collectively make a meaningful contribution to total water intake.

It can also be worth being flexible about what constitutes dinner during exceptionally hot weather.

On holiday recently, my nephew asked for a bowl of cereal for dinner because he did not fancy anything else. I thought that was a perfectly sensible choice. It was cool, familiar, contained milk and, crucially, he wanted to eat it.

Would I suggest cereal for dinner every night? Probably not. But we do not usually have heatwaves every night in the UK, although recent summers sometimes seem determined to test that proposition.

Food helps, but keep offering drinks

Water-rich foods can contribute appreciably to children’s total water intake, but studies suggest that differences in how much people drink still account for most of the variation in overall water consumption. So fruit, yoghurt and ice lollies are useful additions rather than replacements for regular drinks.

Parents should also take possible dehydration seriously. A study of dehydration in children found that no single symptom is sufficient to diagnose it reliably, so a combination of changes in a child’s appearance, behaviour and fluid intake may be more informative than watching for one particular sign.

The useful principle is simple: keep offering drinks, but remember that hydration can arrive on a plate as well as in a glass.

A record year for wildfires was last night blamed on Labour’s environmental policies.

Some 1,017 infernos have ravaged England and Wales this year – already as many as there were in the whole of 2025, the previous worst year.

With temperatures forecast to hit 38C today, campaigners say the Government has ignored warnings that its policies have turned swathes of countryside into tinderboxes.

They say Labour’s rewilding drive, which involves allowing nature to look after itself without human interference, has caused a huge build-up of dry vegetation primed to ignite in heatwaves. 

Gamekeepers and farmers traditionally carried out controlled burning of heather and grasses in the cooler months – encouraging new shoots on which grouse and sheep graze.

Last year, Labour extended rules preventing the burning on 1.6million acres of land. 

It says the move, targeted at peatlands, would improve air quality and protect environmental and public health.

Jonathan Roberts, of the Country Land and Business Association, said: ‘Last year was the worst on record for wildfires, yet ministers responded by making it harder for land managers to carry out the controlled burning necessary to stop wildfires taking hold in the warmer months.

Drivers were ordered to abandon their vehicles and walk down the side of the A31 when the fire took hold on Sunday afternoon. There is no suggestion this fire was as a result of rewilding

‘Government has in effect banned the single-most important method of preventing wildfires, and we are now living with the consequences. Put simply, they must reverse the policy immediately.’

His concerns are echoed by the Countryside Alliance, which said ministers had made a ‘foolish decision’.

‘Moorland communities are facing increasing challenges, the Government having recently more than trebled the area over which the controlled burning of vegetation is effectively banned in our uplands,’ it said. 

‘The Countryside Alliance has repeatedly warned that by ignoring the latest scientific evidence, the Government is significantly increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires.’

The warnings came as more than 100 firefighters tackle a major blaze in the New Forest that has raged for four days. 

Numerous other fires around the country have stretched resources, with crews in South Wales yesterday describing ‘carnage’ as they battled seven separate blazes, some of which they believe were set maliciously.

Andy Burnham last night called on shops to stop selling disposable barbecues, which he said were behind many of the blazes. He hinted at a summertime ban in the future.

Lord Botham, a vocal critic of rewilding, urged the Prime Minister to take ‘decisive’ action and place the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which manages the policy, into special measures for ‘reckless incompetence’.

The blaze tore through hundreds of acres of heathland and forced fire chiefs to declare a major incident. There is no suggestion this fire was as a result of rewilding

‘Our wildfire crisis is man-made. It is the result of dreadful policy mistakes repeated year after year,’ the former England cricket captain said.

‘For two decades we have added far too much vegetation to our landscape and are now suffering the inevitable consequences. Unless Andy Burnham acts decisively there will be fatalities.’

Natural England insists heather burning damages carbon-storing peat and it instead promotes mechanical cutting – but critics say while this reduces the so-called fuel load, it leaves ignitable materials behind.

‘The winter burns used to create firebreaks. Now we have huge expanses of continuous, ageing vegetation. The result is disaster after disaster,’ Lord Botham wrote in a newspaper. 

‘The new winter burning season is due to start on October 1. The Prime Minister has only weeks to reverse last year’s ban and get these preventative winter burns restarted.’

Andrew Gilruth, of the Moorland Association, said: ‘Rewilding sounds like a good idea, unless you end up facing a wall of flames.

‘We simply have far, far too much vegetation covering our landscape and until we reverse rewilding, the wildfires will get worse and worse.’

Defra said its policies were a ‘long-term’ solution.

A spokesman said: ‘Peatland restoration is the most effective, sustainable, and long-term solution for reducing fuel load on degraded peatlands, as wetter, healthy-functioning peatlands hold more water in the landscape for longer and are more resilient to the impacts of wildfire.’

Eurovision bosses are introducing some new rules ahead of next year’s contest.

On Wednesday afternoon, organisers confirmed that new regulations were being put in place from 2027 onwards, which most notably say that a winning country will no longer be permitted to serve as host if it is involved in any kind of “armed conflict”, “sensitive geopolitical situation” or “any other situation [which] materially affects the security, safety or stability of their state or immediate region”.

In the event that a winning country does fall into this category, organisers will “identify an alternative host broadcaster” which will “not be required to stage the event on behalf of another member” as the UK did with Ukraine in 2023.

Meanwhile, Eurovision has said that an alternative host country might be also chosen if the reigning winners are deemed to be unsuitable, either due to them not “abiding by the rules of the ESC”, being “found to have attempted to unfairly influence the results or outcome of the ESC in favour of its own entry”, undermining the “non-political character” of the contest, or being unable to “guarantee the safety, security, integrity, continuity or smooth operational delivery of the event”.

Ariana Grande slipped a cozy picture of herself with her on-again boyfriend Ricky Alvarez into a new Instagram album on Wednesday, brushing off the intensifying clamor of fan concerns about her wellbeing.

She shared the album days after announcing plans to withdraw temporarily from public life once she finishes her current run of concerts on September 1.

Her hiatus statement, which cited ‘endless, ongoing public scrutiny,’ came amid a roiling online outcry over her new music video Petal, in which her figure was so thin that her sternum was distinctly visible.

In her new Instagram post, the 33-year-old projected a cheery disposition as she documented her travels on the road with her Eternal Sunshine Tour.

One photo showed Alvarez, a former backup dancer whom she previously dated in 2015 and 2016, with one of his arms wrapped lovingly around her.

Although their faces were kept out of frame in that photo, she included another snap of her clinging to him in which his face was in the shot but the image was blurred.

The Daily Mail has contacted Grande’s representatives for comment.

One photo showed Alvarez, a former backup dancer whom she previously dated in 2015 and 2016, with one of his arms wrapped lovingly around her

Although their faces were kept out of frame in that photo, she included another snap of her clinging to him in which his face was in the shot but the image was blurred

The gathering public concern for Grande rose to a fever pitch last week after the release of the Petal music video, in which she plays a young aspiring starlet attempting to navigate the rigors of showbiz.

‘Tеll me who’s to blame, is it the people or myself?’ she sings at one point in the number. ‘But this time feels so very different. This is not a cry for help.’

Her protruding bones in the video ignited a firestorm of feverish online speculation about her health, with some commentators comparing her to Karen Carpenter, the 1970s pop star who succumbed to heart failure aged 32 after years of anorexia.

Two days after the Petal video dropped online and went viral, a representative for Grande confirmed she would be ‘taking a step back from visibility after she completes the Eternal Sunshine Tour,’ via People.

A family insider then exclusively informed the Daily Mail that Grande’s intimates had ‘begged’ her to take a ‘break’ from her career. 

The hiatus entailed her departure from a planned West End revival of the classic Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George, which would have reunited her with her Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey. 

Nevertheless Grande insisted onstage during a subsequent concert that her respite had been planned ‘a long time ago’ and that ‘boundaries need to be set.’

The Dangerous Woman singer poured further fuel on the conjecture by liking a post by psychotherapist podcaster Terri Cole about improving one’s health. 

Her hiatus announcement came amid a roiling online outcry over her new music video Petal, in which her figure was so thin that her sternum was distinctly visible 

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In her new Instagram post, the 33-year-old projected a cheery disposition as she documented her travels on the road with her Eternal Sunshine Tour

‘Unfortunately,’ said Cole in the upload: ‘I can confirm that not everyone will like the healthier version of you. That’s OK. Get healthier, anyway!’ 

Grande teased fans about her renewed romance with Alvarez during a concert this July by changing a line in her breakup single Thank U, Next.

The song originally contained the lyric: ‘Wrote some songs about Ricky, now I listen and laugh,’ but Grande amended the second half to: ‘We always find our way back.’

She laid the Easter egg shortly after news broke that her controversial romance with her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater had collapsed.

Their relationship had begun in 2023 as an on-set affair during the shoot of their two-part film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical. 

They were plunged into scandal on account of the fact Slater was married to his now ex-wife Lilly Jay, who shares a three-year-old son with him.

She made the disclosure shortly after news broke that her controversial romance with her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater had collapsed

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Grande, heaped with opprobrium, retorted by releasing a single called The Boy Is Mine that was widely regarded as being about Slater.

Sources told the Daily Mail that the song was a ‘slap in the face’ to Jay, who was claimed to believe Grande was ‘rubbing it in’ that she ‘stole him’ from her.

In the early part of June, the Daily Mail confirmed that Grande and Slater had amicably broken up after a relationship of nearly three years.

Grande’s first runaround with Alvarez came shortly before she plunged into her two-year relationship with rapper Mac Miller, whom she broke up with a matter of months before he died of an overdose at the age of 26.

She was then briefly engaged to Saturday Night Live lothario Pete Davidson and married for nearly two years to luxury real estate agent Dalton Gomez, whom she separated from months before her affair with Slater went public. 

Aren’t we supposed to be the Land Of Health And Safety, banning everything from cheese-rolling contests to Remembrance Parades because authorities say it just isn’t safe to hold them?

Yet the Government has deliberately blessed the arrival on our roads and streets of two extraordinarily dangerous menaces, e-scooters and e-bikes. Where are Health And Safety when you really need them?

There is hardly a town or city that has not heard the rush and whine of these machines, or seen the changes they bring.

This week the BBC reported that three trauma centres – in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield – say they have treated 477 under-16s for e-scooter injuries since 2019, with the number of cases per year rising from fewer than ten in 2019 to nearly 150 in 2024. Detective Constable Steve Pennington, from Greater Manchester Police, warned e-scooters ‘are not harmless toys and could lead to horrific consequences when used by inexperienced riders’.

The official answer to this is that the privately-owned scooters so often involved in these accidents remain illegal. Technically you cannot ride them on public roads. But any road or pavement user knows that this law has ceased to be enforced in any systematic way.

They are everywhere. And one main reason for this is that the Government has undermined its own law. It has licensed the use of hired scooters in more than 50 English cities, including London and my home town of Oxford.

Recently it added schemes in Leeds, Brighton and Hove and Plymouth, plus Cornwall.

These exemptions are supposed to be experiments, though they began in 2020, under the pretext of Covid, and there is no sign of them coming to an end or any clear indication of what would have to happen for them to be deemed a failure.

If the Government had been actually trying to make the law look ridiculous, it could not have thought of a better way. Oxford is full of these devices, swerving and bumping about, zooming through red lights, menacing pedestrians and cyclists and making the roads more chaotic for drivers.

They have more or less taken us into the Third World. They lie about in ugly orange heaps near historic monuments or are parked in equally ugly official reservations provided for them by the local authority. They are, of course, frequently just left where their riders finished with them.

Special sites for them are marked out on the pavement. If they are legal, how can anyone take the ban on privately-owned scooters seriously?

A survey of 29 police forces found that 5,544 illegal e-scooters were seized and taken off the streets between 2023 and late 2025. That isn’t very many. From what I have seen, this must mean that tens of thousands go unmolested.

As for the legal ones, they have greatly diminished the quality of life. I have myself been walloped (fortunately quite mildly) by one of them in Oxford’s majestic High Street. At the time I was helping a pedestrian who had tripped and fallen.

The most amazing thing was the rider’s total lack of remorse, embarrassment or even interest in what she had done. I can only assume she was medicated in some way. I have never seen the police stop people breaking clear rules for hired scooters, such as the one saying only one person should ride them at a time.

I have myself been walloped (fortunately mildly) by an e-scooter in Oxford’s majestic High Street. At the time I was helping a pedestrian who had tripped and fallen, writes Peter Hitchens

This happens so often that perhaps those involved think it must be legal and I can hardly blame them. The police, even when present, are plainly uninterested.

I can find no specific figures for the numbers stopped or fined for this blatant, frequent offence. This is often a problem with revealing what is going on with e-scooters or their more menacing cousins, e-bikes. Central records are hard to find. Enforcement of rules against harder-to-spot misdeeds, such as riding while drunk or on drugs, or riding underage or without any sort of licences must be weaker still.

Everyone in the real world knows that speed limiters on e-scooters and e-bikes, supposedly keeping them below 16mph, are a sick joke. Many of these devices can do 40mph, often more, and can be seen tearing round the streets – doing so with impunity. For, as muggers, phone-snatchers and other criminals have quickly discovered, they are the ideal vehicles for crime. They have no number plates and cannot be traced. They have the freedom of the pavements, because nobody will prevent them being there. Who can catch them?

Anyone with two ounces of imagination could surely have seen the likely consequences of allowing these ‘experiments’ in a country where the police are largely absent from the streets.

We work ourselves into a national frenzy over the possible menace of Artificial Intelligence. Maybe it will end our civilisation. It is hard to tell. But e-scooters and e-bikes are a real problem here and now. They take the solid form of hard, fast hunks of metal hurtling about in our midst.

The actual arrival in our cities of powerful, cheap, lightweight, easily-recharged electric motor vehicles has stimulated almost no thought at all – even though it is one of the most significant technological changes since the invention of the motor car.

Anyone who brings up the subject, or suggests it may matter, is almost always met with empty-headed catcalls on anti-social media of: ‘Haven’t you anything more important to worry about?’

The licensing of them has barely been debated in Parliament.

E-bikes were permitted on roads and cycle tracks through an EU regulation confirmed without debate. E-scooters were semi-legalised through a fishy procedure called the ‘negative process’ by which the new rules would go through (in a few short days) as long as there was no substantial opposition. And there wasn’t.

Back in July 2020, a little-known body called the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee asked: ‘Is it a pilot scheme to test the viability of a controversial vehicle on British roads? Is it a means to rapidly expand transport capacity in cities all over the country during the Coronavirus pandemic? And are those two objectives compatible?’

It said MPs and Lords might wish to ask the transport ministry for more evidence to support its case for scaling up the number of trial schemes. It wondered if there was enough data on safety, nuisance and likely costs to local authorities to justify this expansion. It sought clarity on the actual targets and objectives of these trials.

It also said that similar schemes in other countries had been ‘very divisive’, which is one way of describing the fury against them in cities such as Paris.

I see no sign that anybody listened. Is there some strong, rich lobby pushing the other way? We need a proper national debate and proper Parliamentary scrutiny.

I have searched for years for any sign that anybody in government is thinking seriously about the problem. Will it be the usual thing, that we must wait until a terrible tragedy has taken place, perhaps captured by cameras in all its grisly pain and misery, before anything is done?