Another year of Global Action Plan’s Clean Air Night, another round of fear-led headlines. The playbook is familiar. Treat all “domestic burning” as if it were the same, then present a single number that misleads people about modern, Ecodesign stoves. This year’s twist is a new figure of “2,500 deaths” and an NHS cost in the tens of millions.
Air quality matters, we all agree on that. The problem is that the campaign and latest report still refuse to separate open fires and very old appliances from today’s sealed, correctly installed stoves burning dry logs. When everything is lumped together like this, the worst performers totally skew the picture, and the public are misinformed about what modern stoves actually do.
Scenarios from “best estimates” (no readily available data)
The authors build two “what if” scenarios on top of a baseline year. One imagines every UK urban area operating like a Smoke Control Area. The other stops all “secondary” burning, defined as burning that is not a primary heat source. The health and cost figures are calculated from these scenarios rather than from records of real cases.
Crucially, the report states there is no readily available data on how effective Smoke Control Areas are at reducing PM2.5, so the team scaled emissions using their “best estimate” of burning habits
inside versus outside those areas. It also notes that the mapped emissions needed for 2023 did not exist, so 2022 maps were scaled to approximate 2023. These are key assumptions that introduce meaningful uncertainty into the results.
The promised air-quality gains are tiny in their own model
Even the report’s own numbers show the average outdoor reductions in PM2.5 are very small when spread over a year.
•Extending Smoke Control Areas to all UK urban areas would lower average PM2.5 by about 0.019 µg/m³, which is around 0.39% of the WHO annual guideline value.
•Stopping all “secondary burning” would lower it by about 0.1 µg/m³, which is about 2% of that guideline.
These gains are not zero, but they are very modest indeed. The report also acknowledges that these rest on key assumptions discussed above and don’t take into account the policy costs needed to deliver either scenario. Set against that, it is fair to ask whether removing the real-world benefits of modern wood burning would be justified for such small and uncertain reductions.
What the model does not weigh properly
What is not sufficiently acknowledged are the full reasons people want a secondary heat source in the first place. People choose a modern stove for many reasons that go beyond a single metric:
•Energy security & independance
A controllable, local heat source that works when the grid is under strain or prices spike.
•Room by room comfort and control
You can warm the space you are in without having to heat the whole house.
•Wellbeing
Thousands of owners report that a real fire improves wellbeing, mood, routine and family time.
•Cleaner, smarter appliances
Modern Ecodesign stoves, used with dry logs, cut particulates (PM2.5) dramatically compared with open fires and older models. Intelligent control can also reduce wood use significantly while keeping the glass clear and the burn steady.
When these benefits are set beside such small modelled changes in outdoor annual averages, the case for blanket restrictions looks weak. The sensible approach is to replace the worst burning with the best, support users to burn dry, Ready to Burn logs, and keep improving technology and practice. That is how you protect air quality and keep homes warm, resilient and affordable.
Modern stoves are not the same as open fires
The document groups open fires, coal, manufactured solid fuels and all wood appliances together under “domestic combustion”. It acknowledges that different methods emit very different amounts of PM2.5, and that coal in open fires is dirtiest while dry wood is far cleaner in relative terms. However, it still does not split modern Ecodesign stoves from open fires and legacy appliances in its headline health results. That bundling hides the large performance gap seen in practice.
Independent testing for the UK stove industry has repeatedly shown that modern Ecodesign-compliant appliances, used with dry fuel, can reduce particulates (PM2.5) dramatically compared with open fires and with many older stoves by up to 80-90%. Treating all domestic burning as one thing risks misdirecting policy and confusing the public about what actually works in homes.
“2,500 deaths” needs careful explanation
The report presents “up to 27,000 life years lost” and “2,500 deaths” attributed in part to domestic burning (which as discussed above is a misleading term). These are statistical attributions used for policy appraisal. They are not a list of identified individuals and they do not show that modern stoves “cause” 2,500 deaths.
The Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication explains this well. “Attributable” deaths are not a count of real people whose cause of death is known to be wood smoke. They are a way of expressing an estimated share of risk across a population. It helps compare policies, but it should not be reported as if 2,500 named people died from stoves.
Read our full article on why modern wood-burning stoves are NOT causing 2500 deaths
About those big NHS savings headlines
The report’s £54 million NHS cost sounds large until you set it alongside routine pressures on the health service.
•Obesity costs the NHS at least £5.1 billion a year in England.
•Alcohol-related harm is about £3.5 billion a year.
•Health inequalities add roughly £4.8 billion a year.
•Physical inactivity is close to £900 million a year, with cardiovascular disease a major driver.
This is not to downplay air quality, as we care deeply about it and invest heavily in cleaner, smarter stoves, but it does show that £54 million is small in context. Targeted, proportionate measures make far more sense than blanket bans.
A better path for cleaner air and energy resilience
If the goal is cleaner air, the quickest gains come from replacing the worst burning with the best:
•Phase out regular use of open fires.
•Never burn wet wood or waste. Use Ready to Burn logs at 20% moisture or below.
•Replace legacy appliances with modern, correctly specified Ecodesign stoves (ideally clearSkies-rated), installed by professionals and used properly.
•Enforce existing rules and support households with simple best-practice guidance.
These steps deliver real-world improvements without losing the resilience benefits that local renewable heat can offer.
Modern wood burning, done well, fits neatly into a balanced mix with heat pumps, solar and insulation. It shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be either-or. The sensible path is to choose the right heating mix for each home, use it correctly and measure what matters so that policy targets the biggest wins first.