What must a RAMS actually contain?

Three duties stack up behind it. Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires an employer to provide safe systems of work. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient risk assessment, with the significant findings recorded where you have five or more employees. And under CDM 2015, the principal contractor must draw up a construction phase plan, which is fed by the RAMS the contractors on site supply.

No regulation uses the word "RAMS". The risk assessment inside it is a legal requirement; the method statement is how you show a safe system of work exists.

That distinction is useful when a principal contractor asks for a RAMS for hanging a door. The proportionate answer is a short assessment and a short sequence, not a forty-page pack. Regulation 3 asks for suitable and sufficient, not exhaustive.

For each significant hazard, four things: what the hazard is, who could be harmed and how, the controls you will put in place, and the residual risk once those controls are working.

• The hazard, specifically. "Working at height" is a category. "Installing soffit at 4.2m from a mobile tower on a sloping tarmac surface" is a hazard.
• Who is at risk. Not only your operatives — other trades, the client’s staff, the public, and on occupied properties, residents and children.
• Existing controls and additional controls, chosen in the order set out in Schedule 1 of the 1999 Regulations: avoid the risk, evaluate what cannot be avoided, combat it at source, adapt the work to the individual, use technical progress, and put collective protection before personal protection.
• Residual risk. Whatever scoring system you use, apply it consistently and treat it as a prompt for discussion rather than a number that ends one.

NotePersonal protective equipment sits at the bottom of the hierarchy. A control column that reads "wear gloves, wear goggles, be careful" for every line is the clearest sign a template was filled in rather than a job assessed.

The sequence of work, in the order it will happen, in enough detail that a competent operative who has not been briefed by you could follow it. This is the half that gets left thin, and it is the half a principal contractor reads.

1. 01Scope and location. The specific task, the building, the level, the area. Not "electrical works".
2. 02Programme. Start date, duration, working hours, and any out-of-hours or weekend working.
3. 03People. How many operatives, who supervises, and what competencies each needs — CSCS, SSSTS or SMSTS, IPAF, PASMA, asbestos awareness, first aid, and any trade registration such as Gas Safe or an NICEIC or NAPIT scheme.
4. 04Access and egress. How people and materials get to the work area, and how they get out.
5. 05Plant, equipment and materials. Including inspection and thorough examination records where LOLER applies.
6. 06Sequence of operations. Numbered steps from setting up to cleaning down.
7. 07Permits. Hot works, confined space, live electrical work, roof access, isolation and lock-off.
8. 08Services. How existing services are located, isolated and proved dead before work starts.
9. 09Waste and environmental controls. Including dust, noise, spillage and waste transfer.
10. 10Emergency arrangements. First aid provision, rescue plan for work at height, fire and evacuation, nearest A&E, and who calls what.
11. 11Site-specific COSHH. Referenced to the actual substances, with the assessments attached.

If the method statement does not name the site, it is a template, not a method statement.

Almost always for the same handful of reasons, and none of them require a safety consultant to fix.

• Generic — the site address, the specific hazards and the actual sequence are missing.
• No named competent person, or a supervisor named who is not on site.
• Competency claims with no certificate numbers or expiry dates attached.
• Work at height covered by "use appropriate access equipment" with no rescue plan.
• Isolation of services asserted but not described, and no permit referenced.
• No version number and no date, so nobody can tell which one the operatives were briefed on.
• Signed by the office and never signed by the operatives who will do the work.

The last two are the ones that matter after an incident. A RAMS nobody signed is evidence that a safe system of work existed on paper and not on site.

Whenever the work, the site or the people materially change — and then it needs re-briefing, not just re-filing. A revised document that operatives have not been briefed on is worse than no revision, because it creates a record showing you identified a risk and did not communicate it.

Typical triggers:

• The sequence or the method changes
• Different plant is used from what was specified
• A new hazard appears — asbestos found, a live service discovered, weather
• Another trade starts work in the same area
• A near miss or an incident occurs on the task
• A different crew takes the work over

A revision supersedes its predecessor. Sign-offs against version 1 do not carry across to version 2.

RAMS in Estimark are versioned documents with operative sign-off. An issued RAMS cannot be edited — you raise version 2, and version 2 supersedes version 1 with the sign-offs starting again rather than carrying across. That is the behaviour that makes the record defensible: you can show which version each operative accepted and when.

Site clock-on can be gated on induction, CSCS card and RAMS acceptance, so somebody who has not read the current version cannot book onto the site. Inductions, toolbox talks and near-miss reporting sit alongside, and there is a live muster roll of who is on site.

Health & Safety is a £19-a-month module, included from the Pro plan at £249 a month. Estimark stores and controls your RAMS; it does not write them for you and it does not assess whether yours is suitable and sufficient. See RAMS and site safety in Estimark, and when a project needs an F10.