The client's asked for RAMS. What do I send?

How this RAMS is put together

Every hazard row on this page comes out of a library we compiled from HSE's own guidance and from the regulations themselves, and each control carries the page or the provision it came from. Click any source chip and you can read the original. That's the whole design: the page's authority is HSE's, borrowed and attributed, and never ours.

You pick your trade, and that decides which tasks you are offered. Tick the ones you're actually doing on this job. A set of questions about the site comes next, and your answers pull in the hazards a commercial job has that a domestic one does not: people in the building, children about, other trades on your heels, work above ground level, an old building. The rules that match your answers to hazards are set logic, not guesswork, and no part of the document is written by a model.

Then every row arrives unconfirmed. You read it, you keep it, you edit it, or you delete it, and until you've done that to every row the print button stays shut. You also have to add at least one hazard of your own, or say plainly that there are none on this job. It's a bit of friction, in the one place where friction is the point.

HSE puts it more bluntly than we would.

There is one optional step that talks to a server. If you type a description of the job and press Suggest my ticks, that description alone is sent, with names, addresses, phone numbers, postcodes and dates swapped for placeholders first, and what comes back is a list of ticks to consider, each showing the words in your own description that prompted it. Nothing it suggests goes into the document until you tap it. Everything else, from your company details and the site address to the client's name and every row of the document, is worked out in this browser and never sent anywhere.

Where that box goes, in plain terms, because you shouldn't have to guess. It goes through our own server to the model that reads it. The text you sent and the answer it produced are not stored after the answer comes back. The pattern swap runs before anything leaves the browser, and it is a pattern swap, not a promise: keep names and site details out of the box, or skip it entirely and tick the lists, which is how most people use this page.

What it will not do

It will not tell you a job is notifiable, or that you are the principal contractor, or that your document is legally sufficient. Those are not our calls. Where a call like that would be natural, it asks you the question instead and puts it on the document, so the person who does have the answer can give it.

And some work it simply will not draft. Tick licensed asbestos work, a confined space entry, live electrical working, gas work, a lifting operation that needs a plan and a competent person, demolition, scaffold erection, or an excavation someone has to climb into, and the generator stops and tells you what is actually required instead. A Word template cannot refuse, and that refusal is the most useful thing on this page.

RAMS templates, and why this is not one

What a free RAMS template actually gives you

Search for a RAMS template and you get a Word file. Sometimes it is behind an email form, sometimes it is bundled with a fifteen-day trial, and once you open it, it's a blank table with column headings. The headings are usually right. Everything that would take you an evening is still yours to write. HSE publishes the best of these for free and ungated, and its own worked examples cover an office, a shop, a food business, a motor vehicle repair shop, factory maintenance and a warehouse. Not one of them is a construction trade, which is where the roofer reading this gets stuck.

Risk assessment and method statement: the two halves

The risk assessment is the table. HSE's own recorded set is the shape of it: the hazards, who might be harmed and how, what you are already doing to control the risks, what further action is needed, who is doing it and by when. Note what is not on that list, which is a risk score. Neither of HSE's cited risk-assessment pages prescribes a matrix. The likelihood-by-severity grid every template ships is a presentational convention, and any page that describes a 5x5 matrix as a standard is describing a habit. We show a rating because your client's reviewer expects one, and we say plainly underneath it what it is.

The method statement is the sequence. It is where a reviewer looks to find out whether you have thought about the order of the work: when the edge protection goes up relative to the first person on the roof, when the escape route is handed back, what happens to the water at the end of the day. HSE calls a method statement a useful way of recording the hazards involved in specific work at height tasks and communicating the risk and the precautions to everyone involved, and adds that it "need be no longer than necessary".

Site-specific is the whole test

The reason a downloaded template gets bounced is not that it's badly written. It's that it is about roofs in general and the reviewer is holding a job about this roof, on this school, in the second week of the summer holidays, with the caretaker still on site. Sussex asks its contractors for RAMS that are "specific to the task and location, rather than generic". That is the bar, and it is why this page asks you twenty-odd questions about the site before it will print anything, and why it will not print at all until you have looked at every row.

What the client is really asking for

The RAMS request rarely arrives on its own. It comes with the public liability certificate, the employers' liability certificate, the CSCS card numbers and, depending on the client, an SSIP-family accreditation like CHAS or Constructionline. On a bigger site there will be a permit to work for hot works, confined space entry or electrical work, and your RAMS gets attached to the permit application. Bristol asks for that application ten working days before the work starts. Every construction project needs a construction phase plan before the site is set up: the sole contractor prepares it on a one-contractor project, and the principal contractor on a project with more than one contractor. A client can still ask for RAMS as a separate procurement document. King's College London says its project-specific plan is supplied in place of RAMS where the contractor controls its CDM site. None of this is on the invoice, and all of it is the difference between starting on the agreed date and not.

The other two tools we built for UK trades

Same reader, same evening: what you write on the quote, and what you can charge when the client ignores the invoice.

• Do I quote 'plus VAT' or one price?
• They still haven't paid. What can I claim?

Nothing is saved here, so bookmark the page rather than the document.