On your own build, the person responsible for safety is you.
Not the builder you hired, and not the architect. If you are managing the trades yourself, the law puts the duties on you, and most people find that out somewhere around the first site visit. This does not pretend that is simple. It gives you the plan the law asks for, and it keeps every document, briefing and permit that follows from it in one place, in date order.
Every risk a plan is expected to consider, and what you said about each one.
How it gets there
The construction phase plan is the document the law asks for on every project, whether you have one contractor or twenty. Its topics are not ours: they come from L153, the HSE’s own guidance, which is the list an inspector works through.
Every topic says where it comes from, and whose words are in it.
Where your record already answers a topic, it puts up a first draft from what you have told us elsewhere — what is being built, who is on the team, when you start. Every one of those is marked as ours until you accept it, change it, or take it out, and the document will not produce while a row is unsettled. You are not signing something you have not read.
Then the risks. There is a list of what a plan has to consider, and most of it will not apply to one house — saying so is the answer, not a gap. Where one does apply, you point it at the method statement that covers it, or say in your own words what you are doing instead.
What it will not do, and why
We do not write your method statements. Nobody honest would.
A method statement is a legally required safe system of work for a specific job on a specific site, written by the people who are going to do it, and signed by them because they are the ones who know how. A tool that generated one for you would produce a document that looks right, that you cannot check, and that you would be relying on when somebody is standing on a roof. So the trades write theirs, and you keep them.
What it does instead: read the one you were sent.
What we can do is read the document you were handed and tell you what is worth asking about it: regulations and guidance that have changed since it was written, how old it is, and whether what it says matches what you have recorded about your own site — the access, the ground, the hours. It will not tell you whether the method is right. That is the contractor’s judgement, and it is why they sign it.
Which is a smaller promise than the one you will be offered elsewhere, and it is the one that survives contact with an accident.
What it saves you
The question is never do you have a document. It is which version was in force that week, and who had been briefed on it.
Every revision, the date on it, and the day it actually reached you.
Both dates are kept, which is the whole point: a document dated the first of the month that landed in your inbox on the ninth was not in force on the fifth, and you can say so. Every revision stays, so the history is answerable rather than remembered.
Who was inducted, when, and the signed sheet against their name.
Same for the permits, the notices on the wall, and the substances in the container by the gate. None of it is difficult. All of it is impossible to reconstruct afterwards, and afterwards is exactly when somebody asks.
What you get out
Documents you can hand to an inspector, a warranty provider or the next contractor through the gate, and the whole lot travels into the pack you leave with at the end.
The plan
Your construction phase plan as a document, carrying what you settled and nothing you took out.
The registers
Inductions, permits, COSHH and the statutory notices, each as a sheet you can hand over.
The waste plan
The plan and every load that left, with the carrier and where it went.
Every load that left the gate, and where it actually went.
On a self-managed build you are the waste producer, so the duty of care for what leaves your gate is yours — carrier registration and all. That is a sentence most people meet for the first time when something has already gone.