Every contractor has a library of RAMS. That is sensible: the hazards of pipe-freezing or steel erection do not change fundamentally between jobs, and rewriting the same document from scratch each time wastes the time that should go into the parts that do change.
The failure is not reuse. The failure is submitting the library version with the address changed and calling it site-specific — because the whole legal value of a risk assessment is that it assesses the risks of this work, in this place, at this time, for these people.
What a generic RAMS is legitimately for
A generic document is a starting point. It carries the structure, the activity's standard hazards and the controls that apply almost everywhere: the standard sequence for erecting a mobile tower, the standard controls for hot works, the PPE that the trade always requires. Kept as an internal master, it is a genuine asset.
It stops being legitimate the moment it is submitted as the assessment for a project. A generic document cannot know that the loading bay is shared with a live delivery route, that the ceiling void contains asbestos-containing materials identified in the survey, or that the client has banned working after 4pm on Fridays.
The tells a reviewer looks for first
Experienced reviewers do not read a suspect document from the beginning. They check five things, in this order, and they can usually reach a verdict in under a minute.
- Names. Does the document name the supervisor and the first aider, or does it say "site supervisor" and "site first aider"? Roles without names mean nobody sat down with this project in front of them.
- The muster point and the nearest A&E. Are they consistent with the site address? A muster point described as "the car park to the front of the building" on a project with no car park is the classic copy-and-paste giveaway.
- The hazard register against the scope. Does anything appear in the hazards that the scope does not require — and, more seriously, does the scope contain activities that produce no hazards at all?
- Residual risk. Is it filled in, and does it vary? A column of identical residual scores is a column that was typed, not assessed.
- Stray references. Another site's name, another client, a different plant list, a date from a previous year. Search the document for the previous project's name; it is astonishing how often it is still there.
Any two of those together and the document goes back. See what a principal contractor looks for for how the rest of the review then proceeds.
What must change between projects
Everything about the location
Site address, access and egress routes, welfare location, storage and laydown areas, work area boundaries, exclusion zones, neighbouring occupiers, and the emergency arrangements that depend on all of it. Muster point, first aid provision and nearest A&E are location facts, not template text.
The people
Named supervisor, named first aider, the number of operatives, and the specific competencies the work requires with current expiry dates. If a card expired between the last project and this one, the copied document is now asserting something untrue.
The interfaces
Who else is working in the area and when, whose scaffold or MEWP you are using, which services are live, what the building occupier's rules are, and what the phasing means for overhead and adjacent work. Interfaces are the hazards a generic document structurally cannot contain, and they are the hazards that cause most incidents involving more than one trade.
The site-specific information you were given
Asbestos survey findings, service drawings, ground investigation results, structural constraints, permit regimes and site rules all arrive through the pre-construction information. If your RAMS does not visibly reflect anything from that pack, the reviewer will conclude you did not read it — and on a refurbishment project with an asbestos register, that conclusion has teeth.
The plant and the materials for this job
The actual tower height, the actual MEWP model and its rescue arrangements, the actual products with their safety data sheets. A copied COSHH list referencing a sealant you stopped using two years ago is a live inaccuracy in a section people rely on in an emergency.
What can reasonably stay the same
Your company's standing arrangements: the incident reporting procedure, the general PPE policy, the competence framework, the standard sequence for an activity you always perform the same way, and the legislation references relevant to your trade. Reusing these is efficient and expected. The document only fails when reuse extends to the parts that describe the project.
A practical way to work
Split your master into two visible parts: standing content, and a front section of project-specific fields. Keep the project-specific fields as an obvious block of blanks — highlighted in the master, so an unfilled one is impossible to miss — and require them to be completed before the document can be issued. Then do the scope-to-hazard pass described in how to complete a RAMS, which is the step that turns a reused document into an assessment.
Reused documents are also where unusual layouts creep in, as sections get pasted between files and tables lose their headers. How Valify handles non-standard layouts explains what happens to a document whose structure has drifted — and if a section cannot be located at all, that is usually a sign a human reviewer will struggle with it too.
The honest test
Print your RAMS, hand it to somebody who has never been to the site, and ask them to describe the job. If they can tell you what is being done, where, by whom, next to what, and what happens if somebody is injured — it is site-specific. If they can only tell you what your trade does in general, it is not, whatever the address on the front page says.
This article is general guidance on UK construction documentation practice. It is not legal advice, a compliance certification or a substitute for review by your own qualified health and safety personnel, who remain responsible for deciding whether any particular document is adequate. See our disclaimer.