When do you need a RAMS? UK requirements explained

What the law actually requires

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a general duty on every employer to provide safe systems of work and on everyone at work not to put others at risk. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 turn that into a specific requirement: assess the risks of your work, put in place the controls the assessment identifies, and write it down if you have five or more employees.

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 add project-specific duties. The client must make suitable arrangements for managing the project. The principal contractor must plan, manage and monitor the construction phase and produce a construction phase plan. Every contractor must plan, manage and monitor their own work, provide their workers with induction and information, and not start work until they have what they need. The RAMS is the document that discharges the contractor's part of this and gives the principal contractor what they need to check it.

Nothing in those regulations names a method statement. It is the industry's standard answer to the question every one of them asks: show me how this work will be done safely.

Situations where a RAMS is expected

A principal contractor will ask for a RAMS for every package of work on their site. Outside a construction site, clients and facilities managers ask for one whenever the work involves any of the following.

• Work at height of any kind: roofs, scaffolds, MEWPs, towers, ladders, fragile roofs and rooflights
• Hot works: welding, cutting, grinding, brazing, torch-applied roofing
• Electrical work, especially isolation, live testing and work on distribution equipment
• Lifting operations: cranes, hoists, telehandlers, plant with lifting attachments
• Excavations, ground penetration and work near buried or overhead services
• Confined spaces: tanks, ducts, plant rooms, chambers, voids
• Work in occupied buildings: offices, schools, hospitals, care homes, retail, residential
• Work near the public, on the highway or in shared areas
• Buildings that may contain asbestos, where the survey and the RAMS must agree
• Lone working and out-of-hours work

Sole traders and small firms

The 2015 change that took some self-employed people out of the Health and Safety at Work Act applies only where the work poses no risk to others. Construction is expressly listed as a prescribed undertaking in the regulations that made that change, so a self-employed electrician, roofer, plumber or builder keeps the full duties of an employer for their own safety and that of anyone their work could affect.

The five-employee threshold in the 1999 Regulations decides whether the risk assessment must be written down, not whether it must be done. A one-person firm still has to assess the risks. In practice the principal contractor's requirement settles the question, because no site lets a contractor start without a written RAMS regardless of their size.

What happens without one

The immediate consequence is commercial: the crew is turned away at the gate, the start slips, and the principal contractor remembers. Many clients' approved-supplier questionnaires ask to see sample RAMS before a contractor is added to the list at all.

The regulatory consequence follows an inspection or an incident. HSE inspectors can issue improvement or prohibition notices where they find work without suitable risk assessment or a safe system of work, and recover the cost of their time under the Fee for Intervention scheme. After an injury, the absence of a job-specific risk assessment is the first thing investigated and the hardest to explain.

Insurers ask the same questions. Employers' liability and public liability policies commonly require that risk assessments are carried out and recorded, and an insurer will look for the RAMS when a claim is made.

How often a RAMS must be updated

A RAMS is revised whenever the job changes materially: a different scope, site, access method, crew, plant or programme. It is also reviewed at the review date on the front sheet, typically six months for a long-running job, and after any incident or near miss that shows the assessment missed something.

For a recurring job on the same site with the same crew, the previous RAMS is the starting point, but it is re-issued with a new revision, new dates and a fresh check that nothing on site has changed. Duplicating and updating a document is exactly what the revision system is for.

Questions

Sources

The legislation and HSE guidance this guide is based on. Legislation links go to the revised text on legislation.gov.uk.

1. Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 2 (general duties of employers) · legislation.gov.uk
2. Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 3 (duties to persons other than employees) · legislation.gov.uk
3. Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, regulation 3 (risk assessment) · legislation.gov.uk
4. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (General Duties of Self-Employed Persons) (Prescribed Undertakings) Regulations 2015 · legislation.gov.uk
5. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 · legislation.gov.uk
6. CDM 2015, regulation 6 (notification) · legislation.gov.uk
7. CDM 2015, regulation 7 (application to domestic clients) · legislation.gov.uk
8. CDM 2015, regulation 15 (duties of contractors) · legislation.gov.uk
9. Notification of construction project (F10) · Health and Safety Executive
10. Fee for Intervention · Health and Safety Executive
11. Managing health and safety in construction: CDM 2015 guidance on regulations (L153) · Health and Safety Executive