The Telegraph recently compared modern heat networks to communist-era systems. The comparison may be catchy; but it is also technically lazy. The BBC, meanwhile, has reported on the ways Russia has exploited the vulnerabilities of Ukraine’s heating infrastructure, rooted in Soviet-era urban planning and the concentration of heat supply in large centralised plants serving vast apartment districts. But it is a category error to treat twentieth-century, high-temperature, single-source, central-plant district heating as synonymous with the modern low-temperature, multi-source “fourth generation” heat networks now being built across much of Europe.

Heat networks carry hot water; they can fail, they can be damaged, and a burst pipe is disruptive. What should concentrate minds is that we already run a highly flammable fuel through dense neighbourhoods every day. In the grim, unthinkable scenario of a strike on our streets, the danger is not chiefly that some homes might lose heat for a time; it is that ruptured gas infrastructure can turn an incident into a catastrophe, with fire and secondary explosions.

Britain should instead recognise where our everyday vulnerability really lies. It is not a hypothetical wartime strike on pipes; it is the routine exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices that we have inadvertently built household affordability around. The gas price crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not require missiles over British streets to hurt British families; it required only a global market shock.

Heat networks are not a plot, or a culture war, or a foreign ideology sneaking under the pavement. They are a practical way to make energy go further, to capture and reuse what we currently waste, and to loosen the grip of volatile fuel markets on family budgets.