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RAMS & CPP for Commercial Fitout
What compliance documents you need for shop fitting, office refurbishment, and commercial interior work — and how The Site Book handles it for you.
Written by Nicola Dobbie, Founder, The Site BookLast reviewed
TL;DR
- CPP: Required — CDM 2015 applies to every construction project.
- RAMS: Mandatory — building managers will review and approve before issuing a permit to work.
- Key hazards: Working alongside building occupants, fire escape route maintenance, and asbestos in older commercial buildings.
What compliance do you need?
Commercial fitout work has some of the strictest compliance requirements in construction. Building managers, managing agents, and commercial clients all expect comprehensive documentation before you're allowed on site. CDM 2015 applies in full, and commercial clients have additional duties compared to domestic clients.
Do you need a CPP?
Yes. A Construction Phase Plan is essential for commercial fitout. It should cover coordination with building management, permit-to-work procedures, fire safety during the works, dust and noise management, and how you'll maintain safe access for building occupants throughout.
Do you need RAMS?
RAMS are mandatory on virtually all commercial fitout projects. The building management will review and approve your RAMS before issuing a permit to work. They need to cover all your activities on site, from strip-out through to final fix and snagging.
Common hazards
- Working alongside building occupants and the public
- Dust and noise control in occupied buildings
- Asbestos in older commercial buildings (ceiling tiles, pipe lagging)
- Working at height — suspended ceilings, mezzanines, shopfronts
- Fire safety — maintaining escape routes during works
- Electrical hazards from existing services and new installations
- Manual handling of shopfitting materials and fixtures
- Coordination of multiple trades in tight spaces and timescales
How The Site Book handles it
Describe your project — "restaurant fitout, ground floor unit, occupied building" — and The Site Book creates your RAMS and CPP automatically. It identifies commercial-specific hazards including occupied building considerations, permit-to-work requirements, and multi-trade coordination.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need RAMS for a commercial fitout?
- Yes. RAMS are essential for commercial fitout work. The client, managing agent, or building management will almost certainly require RAMS before you're allowed on site. This applies to shop fitting, office refurbishment, restaurant fitout, and any other commercial interior work.
- What CDM duties apply to commercial fitout projects?
- Commercial fitout projects must comply with CDM 2015. The commercial client has specific duties (unlike domestic clients) including appointing a principal designer and principal contractor on multi-contractor projects. A Construction Phase Plan is mandatory, and the project may be notifiable to the HSE depending on its duration and workforce size.
- Do I need a permit to work in a commercial building?
- Most commercial buildings require a permit-to-work system for construction activities. This typically covers hot works, working at height, electrical isolation, and any work that triggers fire alarms or affects building services. Your RAMS and CPP will usually need to be approved by the building management before a permit is issued.
- What about working in occupied commercial buildings?
- Working in occupied buildings adds extra considerations — dust and noise control, maintaining fire escape routes, coordinating with building occupants, securing the work area from the public, and managing deliveries through shared loading bays. Your CPP should address all of these.
What's included at each tier
Starter
£0- Risk Assessments (RAMS)
- Construction Phase Plans (CPP)
- Site inductions
- Worker document signing (no per-signature charge)
Pro
£39/mo or £360/yr- Risk Assessments (RAMS)
- Construction Phase Plans (CPP)
- Site inductions
- COSHH assessments (standalone doc, SDS upload, site-specific register)
- Worker cert tracking and expiry alerts
- Right-to-work evidence records
- Subcontractor tracking
- Toolbox talks
- Worker document signing (no per-signature charge)
- Integrations (Drive, Xero, Zapier)
Business
£199/mo- Risk Assessments (RAMS)
- Construction Phase Plans (CPP)
- Site inductions
- COSHH assessments (standalone doc, SDS upload, site-specific register)
- Worker cert tracking and expiry alerts
- Right-to-work evidence records
- Subcontractor tracking
- Toolbox talks
- Worker document signing (no per-signature charge)
- Integrations (Drive, Xero, Zapier)
- Up to 10 internal team logins
- Site Supervisor: a field-only login for whoever runs the site
- Up to 50 active site portal users
- Site attendance check-in/check-out
- Multilingual worker inductions (9 languages)
- Optional 4-digit PIN for shared-link document sign-off
- Slack Site Ready readiness checks
Site Control
£675/site/mo- Risk Assessments (RAMS)
- Construction Phase Plans (CPP)
- Site inductions
- COSHH assessments (standalone doc, SDS upload, site-specific register)
- Worker cert tracking and expiry alerts
- Right-to-work evidence records
- Subcontractor tracking
- Toolbox talks
- Worker document signing (no per-signature charge)
- Integrations (Drive, Xero, Zapier)
- Up to 10 internal team logins
- Site Supervisor: a field-only login for whoever runs the site
- Up to 50 active site portal users
- Site attendance check-in/check-out
- Multilingual worker inductions (9 languages)
- Optional 4-digit PIN for shared-link document sign-off
- Slack Site Ready readiness checks
- Permanent entrance QR: guest sign-in and contractor self-join
- CSCS credential capture, review and expiry alerts
- Digital induction gating before check-in
- Live people-on-site, attendance and audit-grade exports
- Single sign-on (SSO) with Okta or Microsoft Entra
- Public REST API with scoped account keys
- Signed real-time webhooks into your own systems
Running live sites with subcontractors? Site Control is the per-site enterprise tier above Business — entrance QR sign-in, CSCS checks, induction gating, live attendance and audit-grade exports. From £675/site per month, plus £5,000 setup.
Enterprise · per active site
Site Control
Per-site contractor access and CDM compliance for principal contractors running live sites.
From £675/site per month, plus £5,000 setup
- Per active site, with unlimited workers
- Permanent entrance QR: guest sign-in and contractor self-join
- CSCS credential capture, review and expiry alerts
- Digital induction gating before check-in
- Live people-on-site, attendance and audit-grade exports
- RFIs and version-specific document-review evidence
Where it helps and where it doesn't
Pros
- Phased-working and out-of-hours permit templates built in
- Fire alarm isolation and reinstatement procedures pre-filled
- Principal contractor coordination notes attached to every RAMS
- Occupied-building access control in method statements
Cons
- No CAFM (Concept, Planon) integration for landlord approvals
- Building Regs Part B fire strategy sign-off is still manual
- M&E commissioning certificates handled outside the platform
Why The Site Book
- UK construction compliance tool that ships RAMS + CPP + COSHH + inductions (readable and acknowledgeable in 9 worker languages on Business, with the language audit-recorded) + worker sign-off, including optional 4-digit shared-link PIN evidence on Business, plus site attendance, portal users, site files, document reviews, subcontractor evidence and inspections/actions.
- Generate a site-specific RAMS first draft from a natural-language brief in under five minutes, ready for competent-person review - not a template library you hand-fill.
- Controlled document workflow without an enterprise contract: version history and a recorded issue confirmation before a document is shared with a client or downloaded in the app on every plan, re-sign on revision with superseded signatures preserved plus PCPP import, cert tracking and document checking from the £39/month Pro plan - and on Business, optional named-approver routing (a designated approver accepts or rejects each version, with recorded reasons, before it can be issued) plus client approve/reject/request-changes via share links.
- Transparent pricing: Starter £0, Pro £39/month or £360/year, Business £199/month with 10 management logins and 50 active site portal users. Worker document signing has no per-signature charge; project workers count as active portal users while assigned.
- Build RAMS for any trade - add your own work types and method statements alongside the built-in library, reusable across projects, including a ready-made Commercial Solar PV group. Save a finished job as a reusable project template, or clone it, so the next job of the same shape starts from your own setup.
- COSHH goes deep: a standalone COSHH assessment document, upload-a-Safety-Data-Sheet extraction, a site-specific substance register and an expert-reviewed library - plus per-worker RAMS sign-off and a one-click Audit Pack covering documents, sign-offs, worker evidence, attendance, incidents, COSHH, permits and up to the latest 500 live Site Diary entries.
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