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 gives you the plan the law asks for, and keeps every document, briefing and permit that follows from it in one place, in date order.
How it gets there
Step 1 of 2
The plan the law asks for
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.
Where your record already answers a topic, it puts up a first draft. Every one is marked as ours until you accept it, change it, or take it out. You are not signing something you have not read.
Step 2 of 2
Every risk, answered
There is a list of what a plan has to consider, and most of it will not apply to one home: 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.
We do not write your method statements. Nobody honest would.
A method statement is a safe system of work for a specific job on a specific site, written and signed by the people who are going to do it, because they are the ones who know how. A generated one would look right, you could not check it, and you would be relying on it when somebody is standing on a roof. So the trades write theirs, and you keep them.
Step 1 of 4
It reads 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: guidance that has changed since it was written, how old it is, and whether it matches what you have recorded about your own site.
It will not tell you whether the method is right. That is the contractor’s judgement, and it is why they sign it.
Step 2 of 4
Which version was in force that week
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. Both dates are kept.
Every revision stays, so the history is answerable rather than remembered.
Step 3 of 4
Who had been briefed
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.
Step 4 of 4
What left the gate
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.
What you get out
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.
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.