The email usually arrives on a Monday morning. Your risk assessments and method statements went to the principal contractor on Friday, the team is booked to start on Wednesday, and the reply says the RAMS have been rejected. Please revise and resubmit.

What follows is familiar to most subcontractors. A scramble to work out what was wrong, a second submission written in a hurry, and a start date that slips anyway, with labour standing idle and a client forming a view of your business before you have set foot on site.

Rejected RAMS are rarely about a missing signature. They are rejected because the person reading them could not tell whether you had thought about this job, on this site. This article explains what that reviewer is looking for, the reasons they send documents back, and what a set that passes first time has in common.

What the reviewer is actually checking

It helps to know why anyone reads your RAMS at all. Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, a principal contractor must plan, manage, monitor and coordinate the construction phase so that work is carried out without risks to health or safety, so far as is reasonably practicable. Every contractor on the project carries a matching duty for the work under their own control.

Your RAMS are how the principal contractor sees into that work before it starts. The reviewer is not marking a piece of homework. They are trying to answer three questions: do these people understand the hazards of this particular job, have they decided how they will control them, and will the operatives who turn up know what was decided?

It is also worth being clear about what the law does and does not ask for. A suitable and sufficient risk assessment is a legal requirement for every employer, and its significant findings must be written down once you employ five or more people. A method statement, by name, is not. The Health and Safety Executive says so plainly, while describing method statements as an effective and practical way to help plan, manage and monitor construction work, especially for higher-risk, complex or unusual tasks. The one firm exception is demolition, dismantling and structural alteration, where the arrangements must be recorded in writing before work begins.

In practice that distinction makes little difference to a subcontractor, because almost every principal contractor makes RAMS a condition of access. But it explains what a good reviewer wants. They are not collecting documents. They are looking for evidence of planning.

Why RAMS get rejected

The same faults come up again and again, and most of them are visible within the first two pages.

  • Another job’s name is still in it. A previous site address in the header, a different client on page four, last year’s date. Nothing ends a review faster, because it proves the document was not written for this job.
  • The hazards are generic. “Slips, trips and falls” and “manual handling” appear in every set of RAMS ever written. What the reviewer wants is the hazard only this job has: the live services above the ceiling you are opening, the school next door at half past three, the delivery route that crosses the pedestrian entrance.
  • The risk assessment and the method statement disagree. The assessment says a mobile tower will be used, and the method statement describes working from a podium step. When the two halves were plainly written at different times for different jobs, neither can be trusted.
  • There is no sequence. A method statement that lists precautions but never says what happens first, second and third is a second risk assessment under another title. The sequence is the point.
  • Nobody is named. Who supervises the work, who holds which competence, who is the first aider, who has the authority to stop the job. “The supervisor” is not a person.
  • The emergency arrangements are boilerplate. “Call 999” is not a rescue plan for somebody suspended in a harness, and it does not tell the team where the site’s assembly point is.
  • It ignores what the site has already told you. The pre-construction information, the construction phase plan and the site rules set out the known hazards and the principal contractor’s own arrangements. RAMS that contradict them, or show no sign of having read them, go straight back.
  • It is sixty pages long. Length is not thoroughness. A reviewer who has to hunt for the ten lines that matter will reasonably conclude the operatives never found them either.
A reviewer is not collecting documents. They are looking for evidence that somebody planned the job.

What a set that passes has in common

Good RAMS are not longer or more elaborate than poor ones. They are usually shorter, and they share a handful of features.

  1. They start from a visit or a proper briefing, not from the last job’s file. A template is a reasonable skeleton, but the content has to come from this site: its access, its neighbours, its services, its programme.
  2. They put the significant risks first. Lead with the few things that could seriously hurt somebody on this job and deal with them in detail. The routine hazards can be covered briefly.
  3. They read as a sequence. Arrival and set-up, the task step by step, and making safe at the end, with the controls placed at the step where they apply and not collected in a list at the back.
  4. They name people and the evidence of their competence. The supervisor, the operatives, the plant operators, with the cards and certificates the principal contractor will ask to see at induction.
  5. They fit the site’s arrangements. The site’s first aid provision, assembly point, welfare and working hours, and any rescue plan the task itself calls for.
  6. They say what happens when the job changes. Work rarely goes exactly to plan. A line stating that the work stops and the RAMS are revised if the method, the equipment or the conditions change is what stops an improvised fix becoming an incident.

RAMS nobody has read protect nobody

Passing the review is only half the job. After an accident, the question an investigator asks is not whether the RAMS were approved. It is whether the people doing the work knew what was in them.

That means a briefing before work starts, delivered by the supervisor in plain language, with a signed record of who attended. It means a copy at the workface, not only in the site office. And it means going back to the document when the work changes, which is the step most often missed. RAMS approved for a job that has since become a different job are, in practice, no RAMS at all.

Getting them written properly

Writing good RAMS takes time that a busy contractor rarely has in the week before a start date, which is exactly when they are needed. It is also where a second pair of eyes earns its keep, because the person who priced and planned the job is often too close to it to see what a reviewer will question.

MAST Safety writes risk assessments and method statements around how the work will actually be done, working with your supervisors so the document describes a job they recognise. We can write from scratch, or review and repair a set that has already been sent back, and urgent requests ahead of a start date are treated as a priority. If the wider paperwork needs attention too, our guide to the health and safety documentation a business actually needs sets out where to begin.

Tell us about the job and when it starts, and we will tell you what the principal contractor is likely to ask for.

RAMS: Frequently Asked Questions

The risk assessment is. Every employer must carry out a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks their work creates, and record the significant findings if they employ five or more people. A method statement is not required by law under that name, except that the arrangements for demolition, dismantling and structural alteration must be recorded in writing before the work begins. In practice, principal contractors and clients make both a condition of starting work, so most contractors need them for every job.

Can I reuse RAMS from a previous job?

You can reuse the structure, and much of the method for a task you carry out regularly. You cannot reuse the content unchanged, because the site, the surroundings, the people and the programme are different every time. Reviewers recognise recycled RAMS quickly, usually from a detail that belongs to the earlier job.

Who should write the RAMS?

Somebody who understands both the task and the site. That is often a contracts manager or supervisor working with a health and safety adviser: one knows how the job will really be done, the other knows what needs to be assessed and how to set it out. RAMS written by someone who has never seen the work tend to describe a job nobody recognises.

How long should RAMS be?

As long as it takes to cover the significant risks and the sequence of work, and no longer. For a straightforward task that may be a few pages. A document padded with generic hazards is harder to review, harder to brief and less likely to be read by the people it is meant to protect.

MAST Safety TeamHealth & safety consultants supporting businesses across London & the South East.