Britain’s buckling railways and melting roads will take “decades” to make fit for purpose for a climate emergency, a Tory minister admitted today.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said it will be a “long process” to replace and upgrade infrastructure to withstand more heatwaves in future.
It comes after the UK recorded its hottest night on record, with temperatures not dropping below 25C in places, and a potential record high of 41C is predicted today.
Downing Street warned “we are seeing a trend towards higher temperatures because of the impact of climate change”, while the Met Office said temperatures like this week could happen every three years by 2100.
Asked how long it will take to upgrade existing rail infrastructure to be more resilient, Mr Shapps told Sky News: "Decades, actually, to replace it all.
"Ditto with Tarmac on the roads.
"There's a long process of replacing it and upgrading it to withstand temperatures, either very hot or sometimes much colder than we've been used to, and these are the impacts of global warming."
He said there was no Cobra meeting planned for Tuesday, with the Prime Minister instead chairing Cabinet.
But he conceded the UK's transport network cannot cope with the extreme heat.
He told people to "apply common sense" and "depending on the nature of your journey and reason for it you might want to consider rearranging your day around it".
He told BBC Breakfast: "We've seen a considerable amount of travel disruption, we're probably going to see the hottest day ever in the UK recorded today and infrastructure, much of it built in Victorian times, just wasn't built to withstand this type of temperature - and it will be many years before we can replace infrastructure with the kind of infrastructure that could, because the temperatures are so extreme."
Asked if the transport system can cope with the weather, he said: "The simple answer at the moment is no.
"Where those tracks are 40 degrees in the air, on the ground that could be 50, 60, 70 and more. So you get a severe danger of tracks buckling, what we can't have is trains running over those and a terrible derailing.
"We've got to be very cautious and conscious of that, which is why there's reduced speeds on large parts of the network."
On Monday, Met Office chief executive Professor Penelope Endersby warned today’s record temperatures could be repeated regularly due to climate change.
She told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: "These temperatures are unattainable in the UK without climate change, they just don't appear in the ensembles at all.
"They're still rare in today's 1.1 - 1.2-degree warmed climate.
“But by 2100, we're expecting them to be anywhere between one in 15 and one in three years, depending on the emissions pathways we take between now and then."
