29 August, 2025

This summer is likely to be the hottest on record in the UK, with four heatwaves over the last few months and widespread water shortages. But, as the saying now goes, it may be the coldest of the rest of your life. 

If you’ve struggled with the heat, you’re not alone. Evidence is building around the impact of heat on our bodies, with new research suggesting that it accelerates our bodies’ ageing with a comparable impact to smoking, alcohol use, poor diet or limited exercise. The impact is especially pronounced on higher cognitive abilities, such as attention, vigilance and memory. 

These are the skills that we tend to rely on to do our jobs, whether we work indoors or outdoors and regardless of sector. But while heat can impact our ability to work, there’s little protection for workers in the UK. There are suggestions for minimum indoor working temperatures of 16C, or 13C for people doing “physical work”, but no upper limit for working conditions. Enter the TUC, who is calling for an upper limit to be imposed, along with much more flexibility around when and where we work when the thermometer rises. 

Heat impacts are the most deadly impacts of the climate crisis for humans. For employers, working temperatures should be as integral a part of health and safety as safe lifting and fire drills, while the broader impacts on health, wellbeing and productivity mean they ignore them at their peril. 

By Patrick Bapty