Green MP introduces bill to stop bosses cooking staff alive
Hannah Spencer’s bill would create an independent body to set safe temperature limits, as Britain bakes with no legal protection for workers in the heat
A former plumber turned MP will this week try to force through a law protecting workers from dangerous heat, as Britain bakes through yet another record summer with no legal limit on how hot your workplace can get.
Hannah Spencer, elected in February, is introducing a bill that would set up an independent body to recommend safe upper temperatures for the places we work, and spell out how those limits get enforced. It won’t set a hard cap itself, but it drags into the open a question ordinary workers have been asking for years: why is there no limit on how hot a workplace can get before someone has to act?
That’s the maddening part. However high the mercury climbs, there is no figure in law your employer has to answer to. No cap. No trigger. No protection at all when the heat turns dangerous.
Bus drivers baking in their cabs, builders with nowhere to hide
Spencer has been blunt about who this is for.
“From bus and train drivers sweltering in cabins that are hotter than the soaring temperatures outside and bakers working in temperatures of over 40 degrees, to builders whose workplaces offer no respite from the heat, the government has a duty to protect all of us,” she said.
These aren’t office workers with a desk fan and a window. They’re the people who keep the country moving, feed it, build it. One of her own constituents got in touch about laying tarmac on the roads of Gorton and Denton in heat he could only call “unbearable”.
Spencer calls it absurd that Britain has no maximum temperature guidance. “This is something workers and trade unions have been raising the alarm about for many years,” she said. “It shouldn’t have taken this long to act, but the unsafe temperatures we’re seeing now should be a huge wake-up call.”
Other countries fixed this years ago
The people who benefit from leaving things as they are never set foot on the floor. They’d rather stick a fan in the corner and call it sorted than spend money keeping their staff safe.
The Health and Safety Executive says a fixed upper limit is difficult, because in some jobs the heat comes from the work itself and not the weather. Think of the ovens in a bakery. There’s something in that, but “it’s complicated” has become the excuse for doing nothing while people faint at their posts.
Other countries manage it. Spencer points to Spain, which ties its heat limits to how physical the job is and lets people move their shifts when the worst of the sun hits. It isn’t exotic. It’s just sensible.
The backers are lining up: the heat isn’t going away
Spencer isn’t alone on this.
Her bill is expected to draw support from across the political map, with Labour MPs Rebecca Long-Bailey, Alex Sobel and Nadia Whittome behind it, alongside the SNP’s Graham Leadbitter, Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts and the independent Jeremy Corbyn. Unison and the TUC have long pushed for a cap of 30C, or 27C for strenuous work.
The pressure keeps building because the weather keeps forcing it, all thanks to the polluters driving climate change. Every record summer sends the same message to the same workers. Cope, or clock off unpaid.
A bill like this rarely becomes law on its own. It’s a marker in the ground. Your boss can legally let a room get hot enough to make you ill and so far the government has offered no plan to stop them.