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Guide

How to write a RAMS

A Risk Assessment and Method Statement is the document UK construction uses to show a job has been thought through. Here is what it must contain, and what gets one rejected.

Do you legally need a RAMS?

The law does not name “RAMS” as such — but the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require every employer to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment (and to record the significant findings if you employ five or more people), and the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires a safe system of work. A RAMS is how construction demonstrates both in one document, and in practice it is also a commercial requirement: no approved RAMS, no access to site.

What a RAMS must contain

There is no statutory template, but principal contractors and reviewers consistently look for the same things:

  • Project and scope — the site, the client, the specific task being covered, and the dates.
  • Responsibilities — who supervises the work, who the competent person is, and who to contact in an emergency.
  • The risk assessment — each significant hazard, who might be harmed, the controls, and the residual risk once those controls are in place.
  • The method statement — the sequence of work, step by step, including set-up, the work itself, and making safe at the end of each shift.
  • Plant, equipment and materials — what is being used, inspection and certification requirements, and any COSHH assessments for substances involved.
  • PPE — specified per task, not a blanket list at the front.
  • Emergency arrangements — first aid, rescue plans where relevant (work at height, confined spaces), and incident reporting.
  • Sign-off — a competent person’s review and approval, and a record that the operatives doing the work have read and understood it.

The five steps, in practice

HSE’s long-standing five-step approach still maps cleanly onto a construction RAMS:

  1. Identify the hazards — walk the task through mentally, start to finish. Work at height, moving plant, buried or live services, dust and fumes, manual handling, noise and vibration.
  2. Decide who might be harmed and how — not just your own operatives, but other trades, site visitors and the public.
  3. Evaluate the risks and decide on controls — work down the hierarchy: eliminate the hazard first, then substitute, then engineering controls, then administrative controls, and only then PPE.
  4. Record your findings — this is the document itself, and it needs to be specific enough that someone unfamiliar with the job could follow it.
  5. Review and update — when the method changes, when the site changes, or after any incident or near miss.

Why RAMS get rejected

Most rejections are not about the work being unsafe. They are about the document failing to show that it was thought through:

  • Generic content — a template with another site’s name still in it, or hazards that plainly do not apply to this job.
  • Hazards with no matching control — a risk identified in the assessment that never reappears in the method statement.
  • PPE used as the first line of defence rather than the last, with no evidence the hierarchy was worked through.
  • A method statement that is a description, not a sequence — prose about what the job involves instead of ordered steps.
  • No named competent person or sign-off trail.
  • Missing COSHH assessments for substances the method statement clearly relies on.

The faster way

Writing a RAMS properly takes a couple of hours, and most of that time goes on structure rather than judgement. Complly Risk takes a plain-English description of the job and Rodney drafts the whole document — hazards scored red, amber or green, a sequenced method statement, and the COSHH assessments and toolbox talk alongside it. You can then run “Attack my RAMS”, which red-teams the draft the way a hostile reviewer would and returns an approval-likelihood score with severity-ranked findings and a one-tap fix loop.

Rodney drafts; a competent person still reviews and signs off, and nothing can be issued until they have. Where information is missing, the assessed risk goes up rather than being quietly assumed away.

Draft a RAMS with Rodney — free in Early Access

This guide is general information about UK construction health & safety practice, not legal advice. Your duties depend on the project and your role on it. Every document Complly produces is drafted by Rodney and must be reviewed and signed off by a competent person before it is used.