Weather or not?

The Department of Health (DH) has published a renewed strategy for combating the 25 000 ‘avoidable’ deaths that occur each year as a result of cold weather in the UK (DH, 2012). Since 2010, when the country was gripped by a particularly disruptive cold stint, in which Heathrow airport was closed for three consecutive days and the UK economy lost an estimated £840 million (UK Parliament, 2011), the government has focused attention on combating the UK's susceptibility to, so-called ‘extreme’ weather.

The Cold Weather Plan for England 2012 is an elaboration on the government's 2011 document of the same name and aims to gather information and climactic data, increase multidisciplinary cooperation across the NHS and emulate the emergency response services of countries “such as Finland” (DH, 2012) to reduce the excess winter death toll.