Your obligations as an employer during hot summer months

Many business owners think that since there’s no legal maximum workplace temperature in the UK, hot weather isn’t a problem.

It is.

The absence of a maximum temperature figure doesn’t remove your legal duty.

It just means that there’s no single threshold to hide behind.

What the law says

Your obligations during hot weather come from several directions at once.

Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, you have a duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of your employees so far as is reasonably practicable.

Heat that makes workers unwell is a health risk. Failing to manage it is a breach of that duty, regardless of what the thermometer says.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require you to assess all significant risks to health and thermal comfort is explicitly included.

If heat is a realistic risk in your workplace and you haven’t assessed it, you’re already in breach before anyone has been harmed.

The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require you to maintain a reasonable temperature during working hours and to provide a sufficient number of thermometers.

What’s reasonable depends on context, but the duty is absolute. If a worker becomes ill and the temperature was unreasonable, the breach is straightforward.

What can happen if you fail your duties as an employer

Because there’s no maximum temperature figure in law, it’s harder for the HSE to act on temperature alone without evidence of harm or a clear failure of risk assessment.

The most exposed position isn’t “it was 28 degrees in the office”. It’s “there was no risk assessment, no controls in place and a worker became unwell”. That combination is where prosecution or civil liability becomes realistic.

If a HSE inspector visits and identifies a material breach, you also pay for their time under the Fee for Intervention scheme, currently around £188 per hour of HSE input from the point the breach is identified until it is closed out by the HSE.

In serious cases, an improvement notice sets a legal deadline for controls to be put in place. A prohibition notice can stop work immediately until matters are rectified.

If a worker is made seriously ill or dies as a result of heat and inadequate controls, the employer faces potential prosecution, civil liability for compensation and the longer-term consequences that follow.

Who is most at risk

Some workers face significantly higher risk than others.

Outdoor workers in direct sunlight are the most obvious group, but indoor workers in kitchens, bakeries, laundries and warehouses with poor ventilation are equally vulnerable. Workers near heat-generating equipment face sustained exposure throughout their shift.

Not everyone is affected by hot weather in the same way. Some workers may be more susceptible to heat stress due to factors such as inexperience, medication or underlying health conditions, so it’s important to take this into account when managing work in hot conditions.

Lone workers need particular attention during hot weather. If someone is working alone and develops heat stress, there’s nobody nearby to notice. Monitoring and lone working arrangements become more important, not less.

The signs of heat stress to know and share with your team are dizziness, nausea, excessive sweating, rapid pulse and confusion. If a worker shows any of these, move them somewhere cool, give them water and don’t leave them alone. Call 999 if symptoms are severe or don’t improve quickly.

What you can do today to make a difference

None of the following requires significant expenditure:

• Provide cool drinking water and make sure that it’s genuinely accessible throughout the shift
• Ensure adequate ventilation or air movement, including fans where necessary
• Provide shade or shelter for outdoor workers
• Allow rest breaks in cooler areas during the hottest parts of the day
• Adjust shift patterns or start times during heatwaves where that’s operationally possible
• Relax dress codes where practical
• Make sure that your team knows what heat stress looks like and what to do if someone shows symptoms

How we can help

We carry out risk assessments for workplaces across a range of sectors and help businesses to put the right controls and policies in place before conditions put workers at risk.

Not sure whether your arrangements for hot weather working would satisfy a HSE inspection?

Get in touch and we can assist with risk assessments for your workplace.