What is a RAMS, and why does every subcontractor need one?

RAMS — Risk Assessment and Method Statement — is the document that sets out the hazards involved in a specific piece of work and how they'll be controlled, alongside the actual method for carrying the work out safely. Under CDM 2015, every contractor, including subcontractors, is expected to produce competent RAMS for their own work before it starts.

The risk assessment half

The risk assessment identifies the hazards a specific task creates — working at height, manual handling, noise, dust, contact with plant, proximity to other trades — and sets out who might be harmed and how, alongside the control measures that reduce that risk to an acceptable level. A risk assessment that lists hazards generically ("working at height — use appropriate PPE") without saying what height, what access equipment, or what fall protection is genuinely being used isn't doing the job it's meant to do.

The method statement half

The method statement is the practical companion — the actual sequence of steps for carrying the work out safely, in the order they'll happen, referencing the control measures identified in the risk assessment. A good method statement reads like genuine instructions a competent operative could follow: what equipment is being used, in what order tasks happen, and what checks happen at each stage. If the method statement and the risk assessment don't obviously connect — if the method describes a way of working that the risk assessment hasn't accounted for — that's a strong sign the document was assembled from a template rather than thought through for the actual job.

Specific to the job, not a stock document

A RAMS that's genuinely useful is specific to the actual site, task and conditions — a generic document reused unchanged across every job tends to miss site-specific hazards, and a principal contractor reviewing it should be able to tell the difference. This is directly connected to how subcontractor competence gets assessed more broadly — a thin, generic RAMS is often the first visible sign of a wider competence gap.

Who reviews it, and what they're actually checking

In practice, RAMS gets reviewed by whoever on the principal contractor's team is responsible for approving work before it starts — often a site manager reading dozens of these across a busy project. The review that actually catches problems isn't a formatting check; it's reading the method statement against the site's own conditions and asking whether it genuinely matches what's about to happen. Does the RAMS reference the actual access equipment on site, or a generic type? Does it account for other trades working nearby, per the construction phase plan? A RAMS that would apply equally well to any site, for any client, on any date, hasn't been through that thinking.

Fast-moving subcontractor turnover

The RAMS requirement gets genuinely harder to manage on projects with high subcontractor turnover — labour-only gangs, agency workers, or specialist trades brought in for a few days at a time. Every new individual or crew arriving still needs a valid RAMS covering their specific task before they start, and the temptation under time pressure is to accept whatever's already on file for that subcontractor even if the task or conditions have changed since it was written. That's the same failure mode as letting someone start without a RAMS at all — an out-of-date document that doesn't match the current task isn't meaningfully better than no document.

RAMS also has to be in place before work starts, not produced retrospectively once someone asks for it. A principal contractor is entitled to refuse site access to a subcontractor who turns up without one — see what actually happens when that occurs.

Who actually writes a RAMS

Ideally, a RAMS is written by someone who genuinely understands the task — a supervisor or experienced operative from the subcontractor's own team, not an office administrator working from a template library with no direct knowledge of how the job will actually be carried out. This matters because the value of a RAMS comes from someone thinking through the real sequence of work and the real hazards it presents, and that thinking is hard to fake convincingly on paper if the person writing it hasn't actually done work like it. A principal contractor reviewing RAMS can often tell, from how specific and plausible the described method is, whether it was genuinely thought through or assembled to satisfy a requirement.

How long a RAMS stays valid

There's no single fixed shelf life for a RAMS — what matters is whether it still matches the task and conditions it describes. A RAMS written for excavation work is no longer valid the moment the task moves from digging to backfilling, even if it's technically "the same job" in a broader sense, because the hazards and controls are genuinely different. The trigger for review should be a change in the task, the site conditions, or the equipment being used, rather than a calendar date — a RAMS reviewed monthly by the calendar but never actually re-read against what's currently happening on site isn't meaningfully more current than one that's never reviewed at all.

Common mistakes

• –Reusing last job's RAMS with only the date changed, when the site or task conditions are genuinely different
• –Writing control measures generically rather than naming the actual equipment, method or product being used
• –Approving a RAMS on the basis that the subcontractor is trusted, without reading whether the document itself is sound
• –Not re-checking RAMS when a subcontractor's task changes partway through a project
• –Letting a new arrival on a fast-turnover crew start under an older RAMS that no longer matches current site conditions
• –Having RAMS written by office staff with no direct knowledge of how the task will actually be carried out