Extreme Heat at Work: What HSE's June 2026 Warning Means for UK Employers

What HSE said on 19 June 2026

HSE's message was blunt. "Last summer should have been a wake-up call for all employers," said John Rowe, the regulator's Deputy Director for Technical Support and Engagement. "If we continue to experience hotter summers this could have a big impact on the workforce of this country, affecting everything from health of workers to productivity on construction sites."

The regulator made three points clear. First, it sees a surge in requests for advice during hot spells, which tells you how many businesses are caught unprepared. Second, everyone is at risk — indoor and outdoor workers alike. Third, and most importantly, employers already have legal duties to assess and control the risk. This was not new law; it was the regulator reminding businesses that existing duties bite hardest exactly when the temperature climbs.

There is no maximum temperature — but that is not a loophole

A common misunderstanding is that the absence of a legal maximum temperature means employers are off the hook in hot weather. The opposite is true.

There is no statutory maximum temperature for workplaces in Great Britain. HSE's position is that a meaningful upper limit cannot sensibly be fixed, because in many settings — bakeries, commercial kitchens, foundries — high temperatures come from the work itself, not just the weather. But heat is classed as a hazard, and it must be treated like any other hazard you are required to control.

For context, the law does set an expectation at the cold end of the scale. The Approved Code of Practice (ACOP) accompanying the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 states that indoor temperatures should normally be at least 16°C, or 13°C where the work involves rigorous physical effort. There is no equivalent upper figure — which is precisely why your own risk assessment, rather than a fixed number, determines whether you are compliant in a heatwave.

The two regulations that create your duty

Two pieces of legislation underpin HSE's warning, and it is worth naming them correctly because they are what an inspector will refer to.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require every employer to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to workers' health and safety, and to act on it so far as is reasonably practicable. HSE has confirmed this duty extends to risks from extreme weather events, including heatwaves. In practice that means heat should appear in your risk assessments — not as an afterthought, but as a named hazard with documented controls.

The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require employers to provide a "reasonable" temperature in indoor workplaces. Reasonableness is judged against the nature of the work and the conditions, which is why a documented assessment matters so much: it is the evidence that you considered the risk and responded proportionately.

Worth noting for the year ahead: HSE has confirmed it is progressing a review of the guidance and ACOP for the 1992 Regulations to ensure they reflect a modern workplace. The core duties are not changing, but the supporting guidance is being modernised — another reason to make sure your heat documentation is current rather than copied from a template written a decade ago.

Who this affects across regulated sectors

Heat is one of the few hazards that reaches almost every sector. In construction and trades, outdoor work, exertion and PPE combine to make heat stress a serious risk. In hospitality, kitchens run hot before the weather is even factored in. In retail and logistics, warehouse roofs and delivery vehicles trap heat. In care and healthcare, the duty runs two ways — protecting staff and protecting vulnerable residents who cannot easily regulate their own temperature. Even a typical office has top-floor and glazed spaces that become unsafe during an alert.

If you operate in any of these areas, the construction sector pages and the wider document library set out the health-and-safety policies that should already reference extreme temperature as a managed risk.

Practical steps HSE expects you to consider

HSE was careful to stress that the controls are usually simple and cheap. Its own suggested measures include:

• Making sure windows can be opened or closed to stop hot air building up.
• Using blinds or reflective film to shade workers from direct sun.
• Moving workstations away from direct sunlight and heat sources.
• Insulating hot pipes and machinery.
• Offering flexible working patterns so people can work at cooler times of day.
• Providing free access to drinking water and relaxing dress codes where it is safe to do so.
• Providing weather-appropriate PPE, and letting workers remove PPE to cool down when resting, ideally in shade.
• Sharing information on the symptoms of heat stress and what to do if someone is affected.

Turning the warning into documentation

The gap HSE keeps seeing is not a lack of goodwill; it is a lack of prepared, written controls when the alert lands. A heatwave is not the moment to start drafting a thermal-comfort policy. Four priorities turn the warning into a tick in the box:

Where ProPolicyForge fits in

Extreme heat is one more obligation layered onto an already crowded compliance landscape — HSE for workplaces, CQC for care providers, FSA for food businesses, Ofsted for childcare. The common thread is documentation: clear, current, regulation-aligned policies you can produce on demand.

ProPolicyForge generates health-and-safety policies and risk-assessment documentation that reflect duties under the 1992 and 1999 Regulations, and the toolkit helps you track when each document was last reviewed. You can see how the platform handles ongoing obligations on the features page.