A thorough RAMS review takes an hour or more. A reviewer with nine documents and a Monday start date does not have nine hours, so something gives — and what gives is almost never the first document. It is the sixth, read at half the depth, at four in the afternoon.
The way out is not reading faster. It is separating the two jobs a review actually contains: finding what is wrong, and judging what to do about it. The first is mechanical and compressible. The second is not, and should not be.
Why review speed is a safety issue, not just a commercial one
The commercial case is obvious — a document sitting in a queue is a gang standing at a gate. The safety case is less obvious and matters more. A review that takes too long gets rationed, and rationing is applied unevenly: the subcontractor you know gets a skim, the unfamiliar one gets the full read. That is exactly backwards from a risk point of view, because the document you have read forty times is the one whose errors you no longer see.
Slow review also drives the behaviour you least want. When approval takes a week, work starts before approval. When resubmission takes another week, minor comments go unraised. Speed, done properly, is what lets you keep the standard high without anyone routing around you.
Where the time actually goes
Time a review honestly and the breakdown is consistent.
- Locating content. A third of the time goes to finding which section covers what, in a document whose structure is unique to whoever wrote it.
- Cross-referencing. Holding the scope in your head while reading the hazard register, then holding both while reading the controls, is the slowest thing a human reviewer does and the thing they are worst at.
- Re-reading. Getting to page 22 and going back to page 4 to check whether the tower was in the plant list.
- Judgement. The part that needs a competent person — is this method appropriate for this site — is often the smallest slice of the hour.
- Writing it up. Turning findings into comments a subcontractor can act on.
Only the fourth of those is professional work. The rest is search, and search is the part worth attacking.
1. Use one checklist, every time, in the same order
A fixed sequence removes the decision of what to look at next, which is a surprising share of the mental cost. It also makes your reviews comparable to each other: when every document is read in the same order, you notice that this one has nothing where the emergency arrangements usually are.
The checklist should be short enough to hold — fifteen items, not sixty. The RAMS document checklist is the one we use, and it ends where it should: with the cross-document checks.
2. Cross-reference before you read
This is the single biggest saving available, and it inverts how most people work. Before reading the document properly, do three mechanical passes with no judgement involved:
- Scope against hazards. List the activities in the scope. Check each one produces at least one hazard, and that no hazard belongs to work that is not in the scope.
- Hazards against controls. Every hazard needs a control. Any hazard with an empty control cell is found in seconds and tells you more than a page of prose.
- Plant and substances against the register. Anything in the plant list or the materials list that never reappears is either missing a hazard or should not be there.
Ten minutes, and you now know whether the document is structurally sound before you have read a word of the method. If those passes fail, the document goes back without a full read — which is the correct outcome and the fastest one available.
3. Read in sections, not linearly
A RAMS is not a narrative and reading it front to back is a choice, not a requirement. Read by theme: everything about people, then everything about plant, then everything about the sequence, then everything about emergencies. Related content sits in four different sections of most documents, and pulling it together in one pass removes the re-reading entirely.
It also surfaces contradictions that linear reading hides. A first aider named on page 3 and a different one on page 19 is invisible sixteen pages apart and obvious when you read both in the same minute.
4. Publish your rejection criteria
Most review time is spent on documents that were never going to be approved. A published list of automatic returns stops those documents reaching you at all, and lets you return the ones that do in two minutes rather than forty.
A workable list: no named supervisor; blank residual risk; a hazard with no control; a control that says "take care"; a substance with no COSHH reference; a muster point that does not match the site; missing signatures or dates. Publish it with your invitation to tender, and repeat it in the pre-start meeting. Subcontractors would rather know. What a principal contractor looks for sets out how the rest of the review runs once a document clears that bar.
5. Let something else do the first pass
The mechanical checks in point two are exactly the work a machine does well: they are comparisons, they never get tired, and they are done identically on the ninth document and the first. That is where automated review earns its place.
Valify does that first pass — it reads the whole document, runs the scope-to-hazard, hazard-to-control and substance-to-COSHH checks, flags vague control language and blank fields, and returns the findings grouped by severity. Most documents come back in under five minutes. What arrives on the reviewer's desk is not a verdict but a map: here is what is missing, here is what is weak, here is what is fine.
The reviewer then spends their hour on the part that needed them — is this method right for this site, does the sequence work alongside the other trades, is the rescue plan credible. Understanding your report covers how to work through the output in severity order, and what critical means explains where the line between the groups sits.
Two honest limits. A clean automated report is not an approval and must never be treated as one — the checks are about the document, and the danger is on the site. And it does not know your project: a muster point it flags may be perfectly correct because it is set in the construction phase plan. Overruling findings is normal and expected.
What "faster" should look like after a month
- Documents that would fail anyway are returned in minutes, not days.
- The documents that reach a full review are structurally complete, so the hour goes on method rather than on missing fields.
- Reviews are consistent between reviewers and between Monday and Friday.
- Subcontractors submit better documents, because your rejection criteria are published and predictable.
- Nobody is reading a thirty-page document for the ninth time that day looking for a blank cell.
The measure that matters is not minutes per document. It is whether the last document of the day gets the same attention as the first — and that is a structural question, not a question of effort. If you want a sense of what the hour should contain when it is spent well, how long a RAMS review should take breaks it down.
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.