RAMS: What CDM 2015 Actually Requires (And What's Just Gold-Plating)

I've reviewed thousands of RAMS packs over the years. From £500k fit-outs to £180m commercial schemes. And the single biggest problem isn't that contractors don't do RAMS — it's that most contractors are doing far too much of the wrong thing and not enough of the right thing.

The RAMS Industry

Somewhere along the line, an entire cottage industry grew up around RAMS. Template companies selling 200-page generic packs. Health and safety consultants churning out documents that nobody reads. Principal contractors demanding method statements for tasks so routine they could be covered by a single toolbox talk.

The result? Site managers spend hours every week wrangling paperwork instead of managing work. Subbies copy and paste the same generic documents from job to job, changing the project name and hoping nobody notices. And the whole thing becomes a tick-box exercise that actually makes sites less safe, because nobody reads any of it.

CDM 2015 was supposed to fix this. It didn't.

What CDM 2015 Actually Says

Let's go back to basics. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 replaced CDM 2007 and came into force on 6 April 2015. The key duties around RAMS fall under several regulations, but the most relevant for contractors are:

Regulation 15 — Duties of contractors. This requires contractors to plan, manage and monitor construction work so it's carried out without risks to health and safety. It requires you to have appropriate supervision, ensure workers have the right skills and training, and provide information and instruction.

Notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say "produce a 47-page method statement for every task." It doesn't say "submit RAMS 72 hours before commencing work." Those are client or principal contractor requirements layered on top — not legal requirements under CDM.

Regulation 13 — Duties of principal contractors. The PC must plan, manage and monitor the construction phase, ensure cooperation between contractors, and organise matters so work is carried out safely. They need a construction phase plan. They need to ensure suitable site inductions. But again — the regulation doesn't prescribe the format or volume of RAMS.

The Construction Phase Plan under Regulation 12 and Schedule 3 is where the real planning obligation sits. This should set out the arrangements for managing the key health and safety risks. It's the PC's responsibility, but it should draw on information from contractors about how they'll carry out their work safely.

What You Actually Need

So if the law doesn't demand a 200-page RAMS pack, what does a proportionate approach look like?

Risk Assessments should identify the significant risks of the work you're doing. Significant means something that a competent person wouldn't consider trivial. A risk assessment for "using a keyboard" on a construction project is nonsense. A risk assessment for working at height, hot works, or confined space entry is essential.

Keep them specific to the task and the site. Generic risk assessments that could apply to any project anywhere in the country are almost worthless. What are the actual hazards on this particular job, in this particular building, with these particular constraints?

Method Statements should describe how you'll actually carry out the work safely. The sequence of operations, the plant and equipment you'll use, the competencies required, the control measures in place. A good method statement is essentially your site team's working instructions — something a supervisor could hand to an operative and say "this is how we're doing it."

The test I always apply: would this document actually help someone do the work safely? If the answer is no — if it's just corporate boilerplate — it's not serving its purpose.

Where It Goes Wrong

The most common problems I see:

Generic templates with no site-specific content. I've lost count of the number of RAMS I've reviewed that reference hazards which don't exist on the project, or miss hazards that do. One memorable example was a RAMS pack for a basement fit-out that included a section on overhead power lines.

Too much volume, not enough substance. Twenty pages of corporate health and safety policy, environmental policy, and quality policy before you get to a single word about the actual work. Nobody's reading that. The site manager who needs to understand how your team is planning to do the strip-out isn't going to wade through your ISO 14001 certificate first.

No sequence of operations. A method statement without a clear sequence isn't a method statement — it's just a list of safety platitudes. "Ensure adequate lighting will be provided." Great. When? By whom? How does that fit into the programme of works?

No review or update. RAMS written at tender stage and never revisited once the team actually gets on site and discovers the reality. Conditions change. The RAMS should change with them.

A Proportionate Approach

Here's what I'd recommend for small to mid-size contractors.

Identify your high-risk activities. These are the ones that need detailed, task-specific RAMS: working at height, lifting operations, hot works, temporary works, confined spaces, asbestos, demolition, work near live services. Give these proper attention.

For routine low-risk activities, a combination of your construction phase plan, site-specific inductions, and toolbox talks is often more effective than a formal RAMS pack that nobody reads.

Make your documents usable. One to two pages for a method statement is often better than ten. Use clear language. Include diagrams or photos where they help. Think about the person on site who actually needs to follow this — not the health and safety manager who needs to file it.

And review them. A RAMS document is only as good as the day it was written. When conditions change, update it. When you learn something on site, feed it back.

This is one of the reasons we built an AI RAMS generator into Construction AI — not to generate more paperwork, but to make it easier to produce focused, project-specific documents that actually serve their purpose. The AI method statement generator understands construction context, so it builds RAMS around your specific scope of works rather than churning out generic templates. Describe the task, and the AI generates step-by-step method statements with proportionate risk assessments — what used to take half a day takes minutes.

RAMS sit within the project management module alongside drawings, RFIs, and specifications. Whether you use construction risk assessment software or a Word document, the principle is the same: less volume, more relevance, actually useful on site.

What Proportionate Compliance Looks Like

CDM 2015 requires you to plan and manage work safely. It requires you to assess risks and communicate how work will be carried out. It does not require you to produce a telephone directory of generic safety documents for every job.

Focus your effort where the risk is. Write documents that your site team will actually read. And remember — the purpose of a CDM risk assessment isn't to protect you from an HSE inspector. It's to make sure everyone goes home at the end of the day.