What the disposable BBQ ban actually means in Cornwall

There is a fair chance you have one in the shed or the boot of the car, bought for a beach evening that never quite happened. From Friday, no shop in the country can sell you another. The national ban on disposable barbecues is real, and it also covers less than a lot of the posts sharing it suggest. The difference is worth knowing before anyone strikes a match this weekend.

What has actually been banned

The government published statutory guidelines on disposable barbecues on Friday 14 August through the Office for Product Safety and Standards. They apply across Great Britain to producers and distributors, which takes in manufacturers, importers, shops and online marketplaces.

The wording is blunt. During the current drought and heatwave conditions, a disposable barbecue “cannot be considered a safe product”, and they must not be made available for sale in store or online. The definition is wide enough to catch the lot: a single-use outdoor barbecue with a fuel tray, a grill grid and enough charcoal for one cooking session, with no way to refill or reuse it.

No new law was passed to do it. The guidelines sit on top of the General Product Safety Regulations 2005, which already stop businesses supplying products they know to be dangerous. Enforcement falls to the Office for Product Safety and Standards and to local authority trading standards teams, and a business that ignores it faces a financial penalty or a prison sentence.

The part that keeps getting missed

The guidelines land on shops, not on shoppers. Owning a disposable barbecue you bought a fortnight ago is not an offence, and this measure does not make lighting one illegal.

That is not the same as being told to carry on. At 7.01pm on Friday an emergency alert went to phones across England and Wales, asking residents, landowners and visitors not to do anything that could start a fire. Disposable barbecues were named first, ahead of firepits, garden incinerators and fireworks. Even a small flame, it warned, can turn into a major wildfire in very little time. Councils and landowners can also set their own rules for parks, beaches and open land, so a local restriction can bite where the national one does not.

Cornwall was already at the sharp end

The county is officially in drought, a hosepipe ban has been in force since 8 August, and the ground has had months to dry out. Wildfire callouts were already up sharply before this latest spell of heat.

The past fortnight has kept fire crews out almost without a break. A gorse fire on the North Cliffs near Portreath burned through the night into 4 August. On 11 August there were two at once, a significant fire between a golf club and a solar farm at Mawgan Porth, where people nearby were asked to keep windows and doors shut, and a separate incident at Porth in Newquay. The following morning nearly 60 calls came in about a wildfire at Carnmarth near Lanner, with smoke drifting over Lanner and Redruth. Later that same day a fire in the St Buryan area sent a plume across west Cornwall and briefly closed Land’s End Airport.

The national picture is the reason the rules changed. Figures from the National Fire Chiefs Council, reported by the Associated Press, put the number of wildfires in England and Wales this year at 1,017, which matches the total for the whole of 2025. On 13 August alone, fire services declared nine major incidents.

What the fire service is asking on top

In a video statement shared by Cornwall Council, Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service went further than the sales ban. With drought conditions and the hosepipe ban in place, it asked people to avoid carrying out any controlled burns at all.

The ground and vegetation remain significantly dry, the service said, which raises the risk of fire spreading from bonfires and from controlled burns that escalate beyond anyone’s control, “placing people, property and our wildlife at risk”. It described itself as under huge demand, with crews working exceptionally hard in hot, challenging and dangerous conditions. Cornwall Council thanked its firefighters for that work in the same post.

If you already have one in the shed

• Leave it unlit. The service is asking people to avoid barbecues and bonfires while the ground is this dry, which goes further than the sales ban does.
• Keep any cooking off grass, moorland, dunes, clifftops and woodland, and well clear of fences, sheds, hedges and overhanging branches.
• Stay with it from start to finish. The one that gets away is the one nobody was watching.
• Have water to hand, and keep dousing until every coal is cold to the touch.
• Never put a warm tray in a bin. Take it home if there is any doubt at all.
• Put cigarettes out completely and take your rubbish home with you.
• If you see anything alight in the open, call 999.

The guidelines carry no expiry date. The shelves stay empty until the government decides the weather has shifted enough for the risk to drop, which is not a call anyone in Cornwall gets to make. The request from the fire service is simpler, and it runs for as long as the dry spell does. Borrowing the line from the national campaign, it says it only takes one spark, so “don’t let your spark be the one that sparks that fire”.

📷Credit: Alferova Evgeniya