A method statement is a written account of how a job will be done, in the order it will be done, by people who are named and competent to do it. It is the answer to a client asking not whether you know the work is risky but how you intend to carry it out without anyone getting hurt. On its own it is a plan; paired with the risk assessment it becomes the safe system of work.
The shape of a good one
Start with the job and the site, not with boilerplate. Then the sequence, written in the order things happen: arrival and set up, isolation or permits, the work itself broken into steps a person could follow, then clearing down and handover. Each step names the plant, the access method and the controls that step depends on. A reader should be able to picture the day from it.
What makes one get rejected
Three things, over and over. It describes a different site, because it was copied. It jumps from set up to complete with the actual hazardous step missing. Or it lists controls without saying who applies them, so nobody owns the isolation, the permit or the exclusion zone. Reviewers are not looking for length; they are looking for whether the dangerous part of the job has been thought through.
Trade specifics: electrical work as an example
An electrical method statement lives or dies on isolation. It has to say who isolates, how the isolation is proved dead, how it is locked and labelled, who holds the key, and what happens if a second party needs the supply back. A method statement for the same job that says only that the circuit will be isolated has not answered the question the reader is asking.
Writing it without inventing a job
Write it after somebody has walked the site, or at least seen photographs and the drawings. Get the operatives who will do the work to read the sequence before it goes out, because they will find the step that does not work. Then brief it and record the briefing, because the document only becomes a safe system of work when the people doing the job know what it says.
Questions people ask about method statement
What is a method statement?
A written description of how a specific job will be carried out safely, step by step, naming the equipment, access, people and controls each step relies on.
Is a method statement the same as a risk assessment?
No. The risk assessment identifies what could cause harm and evaluates it. The method statement says how the work will be done. Together they are what the trade calls RAMS.
Does the law require a method statement?
Not by that name. GB law requires a safe system of work and, on construction projects, arrangements for managing the work. A method statement is the normal way of setting both out and of proving them to a client.