Scaffolders in Bristol downed tools at midday on Wednesday, the steel tubes they had been carrying since dawn now “burning hot” in 33C heat. The early finish came after a three-hour start — the crew had been on site since 06:00 BST — but even that didn’t help. “It’s already super hot when you wake up,” said Lewis Winkworth, a scaffolder for Straight up Scaffolding. “It’s a hard game anyway what we do. But this heat makes it twice as hard.”
By 13:00, when I met Winkworth and his colleagues Phil Williams and Louis, the team was “melting hot”. Their safety kit now includes suncream and extra water bottles alongside the standard harnesses and hard hats. But there is no legal limit to how hot a workplace can be, leaving firms to decide when the heat becomes too much.
“Workers in Bristol finish early as scaffolding tubes burn at 33C; no legal limit for workplace heat.”
Ben Harrison, founder of Gloucestershire solar panel installer Mypower, said his rooftop crews are “like cats on a hot tin roof”. The temperature of the sun reflecting off the steel roofs where they fit panels is “significant”, he explained. Mypower has protocols that kick in at 30C — extra water breaks, cool boxes carried onto the roof — but with rooftop temperatures now well over 35C, the company has shortened its working days this week. Teams start at 06:00, two hours earlier than normal, and finish at noon instead of 16:30. “We’ve had to delay a job, slow things down, and be working short time, but we’ve got to look after the guys that work for us,” Harrison admitted, adding that the changes are costing the firm money.
Bus drivers in the region face a different kind of heat: their uncooled cabs regularly hit well over 40C. While the West of England saw temperatures pass 33C on Wednesday, workers across sectors are improvising their own cooling measures — from earlier starts to midday finishes — because no law tells employers to call a halt when the mercury rises. As Harrison put it, his company is powered by the sun, so he feels he cannot complain. But for those handling scaffolding tubes and aluminium panels under a blazing sky, the question remains: how hot is too hot when there is no rule to say stop?