Documents are AI-assisted drafts and must be checked and approved by a competent person before use. Not legal or professional advice. Read the disclaimer
A RAMS is a risk assessment and a method statement issued together. Principal contractors ask for it because they need to see how this contractor will do this job without hurting their own people or anyone else on the site.
A blank table with the word “various” in every box does not do that. The useful version names the trade, the address, the dates, the people, and the controls a supervisor can actually brief.
Arrive, sign in, and brief every operative on this RAMS before tools come out.
Install the access, isolation, permit or exclusion the assessment relies on before the task starts.
Stop and rebrief if the weather, the scope or the people on site change from what this draft describes.
UK law does not say the document must be called a RAMS. It does require a suitable and sufficient risk assessment, and it requires construction work to be planned. A RAMS is the format clients and principal contractors expect because it holds the assessment and the method in one pack that can be briefed.
Someone who knows the job. That is usually the supervisor who will be on site, not a distant office copying last month’s file. A competent person then checks that it fits this address before anyone signs the briefing.
The risk assessment lists what can hurt people and the controls. The method statement is the order of work. A RAMS is both. See the separate template pages if you only need one of them.
No. Under CDM 2015 the construction phase plan is a different document. The RAMS supports the contractor’s duty to plan a particular task. It is not the plan for the whole project.
Long enough that a new starter can be briefed on this job, and short enough that they will listen. A domestic re-roof and a vacant-warehouse keyholding shift should not be the same length or the same hazards.
Only as a starting point. The address, the access, the other trades and the emergency route change. Duplicate the draft and edit it. Do not change the site name and leave yesterday’s controls in place.