Less than two months before new offshore weight rules come into force in the North Sea, hundreds of workers are still above the limit, BBC Scotland has learned. The number has fallen sharply, from more than 2,200 when the policy was announced last year to the low hundreds now, but it has not reached zero, and the industry is running out of excuses for the people still in the gap.
The rule itself is straightforward and has nothing to do with fitness. From November, workers flying to installations must weigh no more than 124.7kg (19.5 stone) including clothing and boots. The reason is winching. If a helicopter goes down in the sea, the search and rescue winch that lifts survivors has a rated capacity, and a person above the limit cannot be reliably recovered. Operators spent years flying heavier crews with no cap at all; the safety case for the change is not seriously disputed.
What is disputed is the cliff edge. Hundreds of experienced engineers, platform crew and technicians work in an industry where the median worker is a middle-aged man doing physical labour in cold water, and the compliance date arrived faster than the culture could. Some have turned to weight loss injections as a last-ditch bid to keep their jobs, a detail that says more about the moment than any policy paper will. Unions have asked for more time and more support. The operators’ position, broadly, is that the rule is the rule, and that flying people you cannot guarantee to rescue is not a business model.
The commercial stakes sit underneath the personal ones. The UK offshore workforce is ageing, the North Sea is in managed decline, and every experienced engineer pushed out over a body measurement is a recruitment problem for an industry already struggling to fill roles. The energy security argument makes it awkward for government to be seen shrugging. There is also a precedent problem: similar weight limits introduced in other regions were phased in over years with medical exemptions and gradual windows, and the Scottish implementation is comparatively blunt.
Two months out, the realistic outcomes are few. The holdouts either comply, get redeployed on assets reachable by other transport, or leave. The CAA and operators will hold the line because the alternative, an accident where a winch fails on a man who was over the limit, is the kind of story that ends careers and regulations alike. The number still unaccounted for is the people on the waiting list who will get there in October and the quiet cohort who won’t. Industry veterans expect the true final figure to surface in November, in the absence letters nobody wants to write.