Who Sets the Thermostat? Care Homes, Cold Snaps and Britain's Missing Rule

On the first genuinely cold morning of a November, a care home manager somewhere in Britain stands in a corridor with a clipboard and makes a decision that will never appear in any council minute. Heating on an hour early, or not? Windows shut in the day room, or left a crack for the residents who ask for them? Garden time at eleven, or a film instead?

None of this is dramatic. All of it matters. And almost none of it is governed by a rule you could point to if you were worried about your mum sitting in a cold lounge.

The figure everyone quotes and nobody legislates

Ask staff, relatives or a local councillor what temperature a care home should be and you will usually get the same answer: 18°C. It is a decent, humane number. It is also a bit of a phantom.

The 18 figure circulates because several bits of official advice converge on it. The World Health Organization has long recommended 18°C for living rooms in temperate climates. NHS guidance for people with health conditions or who are older often says the same. Meanwhile the workplace rulebook — the Health and Safety Executive's guidance for indoor workplaces — uses 16°C as a benchmark for sedentary work, and even that is described as guidance rather than a hard legal limit.

What you will not find is a regulation that says a care home in, say, Salford or Swansea must be kept at a specific number at a specific time. The Care Quality Commission, which inspects homes in England, requires premises to be safe, clean and suitable for purpose — comfortable temperatures fall inside that, but inspectors are not walking the corridors with a thermometer and a penalty notice.

So the number is everywhere and the rule is nowhere. That gap is where the real decisions live.

What the regulator actually looks at

Inspection reports do mention heating. They mention radiators that could not be adjusted in a resident's room, draughty corridors, thermostats set too high in summer. What they tend to describe is a pattern of comfort or discomfort rather than a reading at 7am on a January Tuesday.

This is not laziness. A single number is a poor fit for a building that might be a Georgian townhouse with single glazing at one end of the country and a 2019 purpose-built block at the other. Rooms on a south-facing side can be four or five degrees warmer than rooms above an unheated porch. Residents themselves disagree: one person wants the window open in February, their neighbour two doors down keeps a cardigan on indoors in July.

What inspectors and good managers rely on instead is routine — someone checking, someone writing it down, and a resident being able to say they are cold and be believed.

Where the money and the rota both bite

Cold weather hits a care home twice, and only one of those is on the energy bill.

The bill is the obvious one. Care homes are unusual buildings to run: they are occupied around the clock, they do industrial quantities of laundry, they hold temperatures steady for people who cannot easily regulate their own, and many are old buildings with thin walls and ageing boilers. When wholesale gas prices spiked in 2022 and 2023, plenty of homes were locked into deals signed at the wrong moment, and a fair number of those contracts have only recently rolled over. Managers describe heating as one of the few costs they can nudge in a downturn — which is exactly why some families start asking questions in November.

The second squeeze is staffing. A cold snap does not just make a building colder; it makes the day longer. Extra layers, extra hot drinks, more prompting to drink water, more checking on people in the small hours. Night rotas that were just about workable in October start to creak. Community nursing visits can slip if the roads ice up, agency cover gets harder to book at short notice, and admissions from hospital tend to rise just as the weather makes everything slower.

None of that is visible on a thermometer. It is the difference between a home that is coping and a home that is quietly stretched.

The garden question

One of the less discussed cold-weather calls is whether residents go outside at all. Most homes do not have a written rule; they have a judgement, made daily, about ice on the path, wind chill and whether a short walk is worth a slip.

There is a reasonable case on both sides. Frail residents falling on frozen paving can mean a hospital trip and weeks of lost confidence. But a fortnight indoors has costs too — mood, appetite, sleep, and the simple morale that comes from daylight. The best homes tend to talk about this openly with families rather than deciding silently, and the weakest tend to say nothing at all.

What families can actually ask

If you are worried, the questions that get useful answers are specific ones.

Ask what temperature the main lounge is kept at and who checks it. Ask whether it is logged, and whether you can see the log. Ask what happens overnight, and who is on shift. Ask how residents raise a concern about being cold — and whether anything happens when they do. Ask about garden access in winter and who makes that call.

You are unlikely to get a policy document. You are quite likely to get a sense of whether the home is run by people who notice things.

The case for a number, and the case against

A clear statutory minimum would give families something to point at and give staff something to fall back on when budgets tighten. It would also make the postcode lottery of warmth a little less of a lottery.

Against that, councils commission care but do not set temperatures, and adult social care teams are already wary of adding rigid targets to buildings that vary so much. A number can become a ceiling as easily as a floor — the thermostat set at exactly the minimum, everywhere, forever.

In the end, the promise of a warm room is not made by Westminster or by a regulator. It is made by a manager, a maintenance team and a night shift who decide, again and again, to go and check.