Who Writes a RAMS and Who Approves It? CDM 2015 Duties, Plainly

Who writes a RAMS?

The contractor who is going to carry out the work. Regulation 15(2) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 puts it directly: "A contractor must plan, manage and monitor construction work carried out either by the contractor or by workers under the contractor's control, to ensure that, so far as is reasonably practicable, it is carried out without risks to health and safety."

Planning is the duty. The RAMS is what the planning leaves behind. That is why it cannot be written by the principal contractor on your behalf, and why a document bought in and relabelled discharges nothing: the duty is on the party who knows how the work will actually be done, and the document is only evidence that they did.

Inside the contracting firm, the person who writes it should be someone who has done the work or supervised it, with input from the people who will carry it out. Regulation 8(1) sets the standard for the firm as a whole: the skills, knowledge and experience, plus organisational capability if it is an organisation, necessary for the role appointed to.

Who approves it?

In law, nobody. There is no approval duty in CDM 2015 attaching to a risk assessment or a method statement, and there is no regulation that makes a principal contractor's acceptance of a document mean anything about its quality.

What exists instead is a set of duties that produce an approval-shaped act as a side effect:

• Regulation 13(1): the principal contractor must "plan, manage and monitor the construction phase and coordinate matters relating to health and safety during the construction phase".
• Regulation 13(3)(a) and (b): they must organise cooperation between contractors, including successive contractors on the same site, and coordinate implementation of the applicable legal requirements.
• Regulation 15(3): where there is more than one contractor, each contractor must comply with any directions given by the principal designer or the principal contractor, and with the parts of the construction phase plan relevant to their work.
• Regulation 8(3): whoever appoints a designer or contractor must take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the appointee has the skills, knowledge, experience and organisational capability for the role.

Read those together and the principal contractor's real question is not "is this a good RAMS". It is "can this work sit alongside everything else happening on my site, and did I take reasonable steps over who I let do it". The word "approved" on a returned document is shorthand for that, and the shorthand causes trouble the moment anyone reads it as a warranty of the contents.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because subcontractors get it wrong in both directions. Acceptance by the principal contractor does not transfer your regulation 15(2) duty to them. And rejection by the principal contractor is not an opinion you can argue with on the merits alone: regulation 15(3)(a) makes their direction binding on how you proceed.

What is the principal contractor actually checking?

Coordination, competence and interfaces, which are the three things only they can see.

A contractor writing a method for a lift knows the crane, the tackle and the sequence. They do not know that the scaffold on the north elevation is being struck the same morning, that the client has a noise consent limiting when the road can be occupied, or that another trade has already been given the same slab for a concrete pour. The principal contractor holds the only view in which those collide, and the coordination duty in regulation 13(3) is why.

So the useful review by a principal contractor asks, in order:

1. Does this document describe this project? Site, client, task, dates, the parties named. A document carrying a previous job's details forward is the cheapest defect to find and the most common one to miss.
2. Does it conflict with the construction phase plan or another contractor's work? Sequence, exclusion zones, shared access, shared plant, services isolation, permits already issued to someone else.
3. Does it assume something we have not provided? Rescue resourced by people nobody has appointed, welfare that does not exist yet, a road closure that has not been granted, a temporary works design that has not been checked.
4. Is anything in it work we did not let? Regulation 15(3) binds the contractor to the relevant parts of the plan, and a method claiming authority over work another party holds is a coordination failure before it is a safety one.

That list is not a substitute for reading the risk register. It is the part of the reading that belongs to the principal contractor rather than to the author, and being explicit about the boundary is what stops a signature meaning more than anybody checked. There is more on that boundary in competent person sign-off for RAMS.

Construction phase plan or RAMS: which is which?

The construction phase plan governs the site; the RAMS governs a task. They are different documents with different authors and different legal footing, and one is required by name while the other is not.

Regulation 12(1) requires the principal contractor to draw up a construction phase plan, or arrange for one to be drawn up, during the pre-construction phase and before setting up a construction site. Where there is only one contractor on the project, regulation 15(5) puts the same duty on that contractor. Regulation 12(2) says what it must contain: "the health and safety arrangements and site rules taking account, where necessary, of the industrial activities taking place on the construction site and, where applicable, must include specific measures concerning work which falls within one or more of the categories set out in Schedule 3."

The plan is not a folder of RAMS. It is the site's own arrangements: rules, access, welfare, emergency procedures, traffic, the sequence of the work and how the parties will coordinate. Individual RAMS feed it and must be consistent with it, but a construction phase plan assembled by stapling subcontractor documents together has not set out any arrangements at all.

Regulation 12(4) then makes it a live document: the principal contractor must ensure the plan is "appropriately reviewed, updated and revised from time to time" so that it stays sufficient. A plan written in week one and never touched again fails that duty on its own terms, whatever its contents.

	Construction phase plan	RAMS
Required by name in law	Yes, CDM 2015 regulation 12(1) and 15(5)	No. The risk assessment is required by MHSWR 1999 regulation 3; the method statement is not named
Written by	The principal contractor, or the sole contractor where there is only one	The contractor carrying out the work
Covers	The site: arrangements, rules, coordination, the phase as a whole	One task: hazards, controls, sequence
Must be revised	Yes, regulation 12(4), throughout the project	When the work, the site or the people change
Schedule 3 work	Specific measures required where applicable, regulation 12(2)	The place where those measures are usually detailed

What is Schedule 3, and why does it change the paperwork?

Schedule 3 is CDM 2015's list of work involving particular risks, and where a project includes any of it the construction phase plan must include specific measures concerning that work. It reads, in full:

1. Work which puts workers at risk of burial under earthfalls, engulfment in swampland or falling from a height, where the risk is particularly aggravated by the nature of the work or processes used or by the environment at the place of work or site.
2. Work which puts workers at risk from chemical or biological substances constituting a particular danger to the safety or health of workers or involving a legal requirement for health monitoring.
3. Work with ionizing radiation requiring the designation of controlled or supervised areas under regulation 16 of the Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999.
4. Work near high voltage power lines.
5. Work exposing workers to the risk of drowning.
6. Work on wells, underground earthworks and tunnels.
7. Work carried out by divers having a system of air supply.
8. Work carried out by workers in caissons with a compressed air atmosphere.
9. Work involving the use of explosives.
10. Work involving the assembly or dismantling of heavy prefabricated components.

Two features of that list are worth noticing before you check your job against it.

It is written in terms of exposure rather than trade. Item 1 does not say "excavation", it says burial under earthfalls where the risk is particularly aggravated by the nature of the work or the environment. A shallow dig in unstable made ground beside a live carriageway can sit inside item 1 while a deeper, battered dig in stable clay does not.

And item 4 says "high voltage power lines" without a distance. The distance comes from HSE guidance rather than from the Schedule: GS6, Avoiding danger from overhead power lines, says you should manage the risks if you intend to work within 10 metres measured at ground level horizontally from below the nearest wire, and cites the Energy Networks Association exclusion zones of 1 metre for low voltage, 3 metres for 11 kV and 33 kV, 6 metres for 132 kV and 7 metres for 275 kV and 400 kV. The Schedule tells you the category. The guidance tells you the number.

Who does what: the whole set of CDM 2015 duties

Every party in the chain has a duty that produces or consumes the document, and the failures cluster at the joins.

Party	Core duty	Regulation
Client	Make suitable arrangements for managing the project, including allocating sufficient time and other resources; provide pre-construction information as soon as practicable to every designer and contractor	4(1), 4(4)
Client	Notify HSE in writing before the construction phase begins where the project is notifiable	6(2)
Principal designer	Plan, manage, monitor and coordinate health and safety in the pre-construction phase; assist the principal contractor in preparing the construction phase plan	11, 12(3)
Principal designer	Prepare and maintain the health and safety file	12(5), 12(6)
Designer	When preparing or modifying designs, eliminate, reduce or control foreseeable risks	9
Principal contractor	Plan, manage, monitor and coordinate the construction phase; organise cooperation between contractors	13(1), 13(3)
Principal contractor	Draw up the construction phase plan and keep it reviewed and revised	12(1), 12(4)
Principal contractor	Consult and engage with workers	14
Contractor	Plan, manage and monitor their own work; comply with directions and the relevant parts of the plan	15(2), 15(3)
Contractor	Provide supervision, instructions and information including a suitable site induction and the procedures for serious and imminent danger	15(8), 15(9)
Everyone with a duty	Cooperate with any other person working on the project to the extent necessary for them to fulfil their duty; report anything likely to endanger health or safety	8(4), 8(5)

Regulation 8(4) is the one to keep in view when a document is passed between two firms. Cooperation is a duty in itself, which means a principal contractor sitting on a submission until the day before the works start, and a subcontractor issuing a method that assumes information nobody has given them, are both failing the same regulation from opposite ends.

When is a project notifiable, and does that change who writes the RAMS?

A project is notifiable when the construction work is scheduled to last longer than 30 working days and have more than 20 workers working simultaneously at any point, or to exceed 500 person days. That is regulation 6(1). The client gives notice in writing to HSE as soon as practicable before the construction phase begins, the notice carries the particulars in Schedule 1, and it must be "clearly displayed in the construction site office in a comprehensible form where it can be read by any worker engaged in the construction work".

Notification changes nothing about who writes RAMS. It is a threshold for telling the regulator a project exists, not a threshold for planning. The duties in regulations 13 and 15 apply to every project, and a construction phase plan is required for every project, notifiable or not.

The threshold most often misread is the first one. Both conditions have to hold: longer than 30 working days and more than 20 workers at some point simultaneously. A four-month job with six people on it is not notifiable on that limb, though it may still exceed 500 person days on the second.

How should a principal contractor manage subcontractor RAMS at volume?

By deciding in advance what a submission has to survive, and by reading for comparisons rather than for reassurance.

The volume problem is real and it is getting worse. Documents arrive that read specifically without having been thought about specifically, and the generic tell that reviewers spent twenty years learning to spot has been removed rather than fixed. A reviewer who is reading for the signs of a template is now calibrated against a signal that is no longer transmitted.

What survives that is a check that names what is compared against what, so both halves can be quoted:

• Scope against the project. Does every site-identifying fact belong to this job, and where the document states its scope twice, do the restatements agree.
• The register against the document itself. Does the register assess every hazard the document names anywhere in its own pages, including hazards named only in another row's controls. A control written to deal with something is the document telling you that thing is present on this job.
• The method against the register. Does the method carry out every control the assessment relies on, and does the assessment cover every step the method plans. The second direction catches the most: work nobody assessed is unassessed however good the register is about everything else.
• Order. Does each control appear before the step that needs it. Isolation after dismantling is not isolation.
• Assignability. Is each control an act with a person and a trigger, or a hedge: "consideration given to", "where possible", "as required". A control nobody is assigned and nothing triggers is a sentence, and a residual score resting on it is not earned.

Set a submission window that leaves time for a second pass, tell contractors what you will be comparing, and say what you did not check when you return it. A returned document carrying "coordination checked, temporary works design not reviewed" tells the next reader something true. A blank "approved" does not.

Frequently asked questions

Does the principal contractor write RAMS for subcontractors? No. Regulation 15(2) places the planning duty on the contractor carrying out the work. A principal contractor who writes the method for another firm's work has taken on that firm's duty without that firm's knowledge of the job, which is the wrong way round on both counts.

Is a construction phase plan the same as a RAMS? No. The construction phase plan is required by regulation 12(1) and sets out the site's health and safety arrangements and site rules, with specific measures for any Schedule 3 work. A RAMS covers one task. The plan is not a folder of RAMS, and a plan assembled by collecting subcontractor documents has not set out any arrangements of its own.

Does a single-contractor project need a construction phase plan? Yes. Regulation 15(5) requires the sole contractor to draw one up, or arrange for one to be drawn up, as soon as practicable before setting up a construction site, and regulation 15(6) requires it to meet regulation 12(2). The plan should be proportionate to the project, but it is not optional.

Who approves the construction phase plan? Nobody approves it in the sense of countersigning it. The principal contractor draws it up under regulation 12(1) and must keep it reviewed, updated and revised under regulation 12(4). The client's duty under regulation 4(5) is to ensure a plan is drawn up before the construction phase begins, which is an assurance that it exists and is being maintained rather than an endorsement of its contents.

What if a subcontractor refuses to change their RAMS? Regulation 15(3)(a) requires a contractor to comply with any directions given by the principal designer or the principal contractor, so a direction not to start until a defect is corrected is binding. If the disagreement is about competence rather than a single document, the relevant duty is regulation 8, and the answer runs back to the appointment rather than forward into the paperwork.

Do RAMS need to be sent to the client? Not as a matter of course. The client's duties under regulation 4 are about arrangements, resources, pre-construction information and ensuring the plan and the health and safety file exist. Clients frequently ask for RAMS under the contract rather than under CDM, which is a commercial requirement and worth answering as one.

Where this leaves the chain

The document was never the safety. It is evidence that a competent person planned this work before anybody stood in the excavation, which is why the duty sits with the party who knows how the work will be done and why nobody downstream can supply what was not thought about upstream.

About the author

Dylan Squires is the founder of Tarian and a former Royal Engineers officer and site manager, SMSTS qualified, with delivery experience across UK civil engineering projects. He writes about the reasoning behind construction safety documents rather than the format of them.