Lone Worker Safety: What Your RAMS Should Cover

Working Alone — The Reality for Most Tradespeople

If you're a sole trader, working alone isn't a special arrangement you opt into. It's just the job. You turn up at the property, let yourself in, get on with it, and pack up. No one's stood next to you handing you tools or checking you're alright. That's true for most plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and general builders doing domestic and small commercial work across the country, every single day.

Because it's so normal, a lot of tradespeople assume there's nothing to think about. You've done thousands of jobs alone without incident, so why would this one be different? The problem is that "usually fine" isn't the same as "properly assessed." Lone working carries a specific set of risks that don't exist when someone else is on site with you, and the law expects you to think about them, not just carry on out of habit.

This isn't about scaring you off working solo. Most trade work can be done safely by one person. It's about knowing where the line sits, what tasks genuinely need a second pair of hands, and what your RAMS should say about the rest of it.

What the Law Actually Says About Lone Working

There's a persistent myth that lone working is somehow against health and safety law, or that it's only allowed with special permission. Neither is true. The Health and Safety Executive is clear that working alone is not, in itself, illegal. What the law requires is that the risks of doing a job alone are assessed and managed like any other risk on the job.

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, Section 2, places a general duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety, and welfare of their workers. That duty doesn't shrink because a worker happens to be on their own. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 then makes the practical mechanism explicit: employers must carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment of the work their employees do, and that includes anything specific to doing it without anyone else around.

A few specific regulations sharpen this further for particular types of work:

• The Work at Height Regulations 2005, Regulation 6(5)(b), treats lone working at height as something only acceptable in exceptional circumstances, and only with proper safeguards in place.
• The Confined Spaces Regulations 1997 say you shouldn't enter a confined space at all unless it's not reasonably practicable to avoid it, and the emergency arrangements the regulations demand are hard to meet without someone else involved.
• The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, Regulation 14, restricts work on or near live conductors to situations where it's unreasonable to work dead, and safe isolation procedures rely on someone being available to respond if things go wrong.

None of these ban lone working outright. What they do is push certain jobs firmly into "needs a team" territory, because the risk of something going wrong, combined with the risk of no one being there to help, tips the balance.

Tasks That Should Never Be Done Alone

Most day-to-day trade work is fine to do solo. First fix carpentry, tap changes, socket replacements, small plastering jobs, general maintenance, none of it needs a second person as a rule. But there's a shortlist of tasks where working alone stops being a judgement call and starts being a genuine hazard that a written risk assessment can't fully control on its own.

The common thread across this list is what happens if it goes wrong. A scaffold board that fails, a fall through a fragile roof light, a collapse in a confined space, a shock from a live conductor, a fire that gets away from you, a lift that goes wrong, or ground giving way at the edge of a trench, all of these can incapacitate someone in seconds, with no warning and no time to call for help. If there's no one there to raise the alarm, call 999, or pull you clear, the outcome is far worse than the same incident happening with a second person present.

If a job in front of you falls into one of these categories, the answer isn't a better lone worker policy. It's getting a second person on site, or in the case of height work, using equipment like a MEWP that reduces the risk enough to make solo work defensible. Our guide to working at height regulations goes into more detail on when height work needs more than one person.

What Your Lone Worker Risk Assessment Must Cover

A proper lone worker risk assessment isn't a separate box-ticking exercise bolted onto your normal RAMS. It's an extra layer of thinking applied to the same job. For each task, ask what changes because you're doing this without anyone else around, and then write down what you're doing about it.

At minimum, it needs to cover the task itself and whether it's suitable for one person, what could go wrong and how likely that is, what happens if you're injured and can't call for help yourself, how you'll stay in contact with someone during the job, what your emergency procedure looks like with no one on site to react, and any risks that are specific to lone working rather than the task in general, like violence, aggression, or being unable to summon assistance quickly.

That last point matters more than it might seem. A lone working policy that sits in a folder somewhere, separate from the RAMS you actually use on site, isn't much use to anyone. If lone working is part of how a job will be done, it needs to be written into that job's RAMS, alongside the other hazards and controls, not treated as a standalone document nobody reads. Our guide to writing RAMS covers how to structure a document that actually reflects the job in front of you.

Communication Plans That Actually Work

The single biggest control for lone working risk is knowing that if something goes wrong, someone will notice in a reasonable timeframe. That's what a communication plan is for. It doesn't need to be complicated, but it does need to be specific enough that it actually works when you're not thinking clearly, which is exactly the state you'd be in after an accident.

A workable plan usually includes a set check-in time, agreed in advance with someone who isn't on site, whether that's the office, a partner, or another tradesperson. It includes what that person does if you don't check in, not just "they'll worry," but an actual next step, like calling your phone, then calling the property, then going to check. It includes what details they hold about where you are, what job you're doing, and what time you expect to finish. And it includes a backup for the obvious failure point: no signal.

Phone signal drops out more often than people plan for, particularly in basements, plant rooms, rural properties, and older buildings with thick walls. If your communication plan only works when you've got full bars, it's not really a plan. Build in an alternative, whether that's checking in before you go somewhere you know has poor signal, using the landline at the property, or carrying a device that doesn't rely on mobile coverage for higher-risk or remote jobs.

Violence and Aggression — The Hidden Risk for Domestic Visits

When people think about lone worker risk in construction, they usually think about falls, electric shock, or crush injuries. What gets overlooked far more often is the risk that comes from other people, and for tradespeople doing domestic work, that's a real and recurring issue.

Going into someone's home alone means you have no control over who else is there, what mood they're in, or how a disagreement over cost, timescale, or an unexpected problem might play out. Verbal aggression is more common than people admit, and it can escalate quickly when there's no one else present to defuse the situation or simply act as a witness. Dog attacks are another risk that catches tradespeople out regularly, often because a homeowner insists "he's fine with people" right before he isn't.

None of this means treating every domestic job as a threat. It means building a few habits into how you work. Get a sense of the property and the people in it before you commit to being alone in a room with the door closed. Trust your instincts if something feels off, and have a reason ready to leave if you need one. Ask about pets before you arrive, and don't take a homeowner's reassurance as a guarantee. Let someone know where you are, as covered above, so if a visit turns into something you didn't expect, someone else already knows your location and roughly when to expect to hear from you.

What to Include in Your RAMS for Lone Working

When you're putting together the RAMS for a job that will involve lone working, there's a specific set of things worth including, over and above the standard hazards and controls for the task itself.

• A clear statement that the job will be carried out by one person, and confirmation that this has been considered acceptable for the specific tasks involved, not just assumed by default.
• The communication plan: check-in times, who's checking, and what happens if a check-in is missed.
• First aid arrangements. A lone worker needs their own first aid kit, appropriate training, and a clear idea of what they'd actually do if they injured themselves with no one else there to help. This is different from relying on a first aider being present on a busier site.
• Emergency procedures written for the reality of being alone, not copied from a team-based site procedure that assumes someone else will call for help or take charge.
• What to do about signal loss or communication failure, covered above.
• Where relevant, the specific risks of domestic visits, including any known factors about the property or occupants that affect the job.
• A note on RIDDOR reporting arrangements. With no colleague present to see an injury happen or report it promptly, there's a real risk that a reportable incident gets logged late, or not at all, simply because there was no one else around to flag it. Your RAMS should set out how a lone worker reports their own incidents and near misses, and to whom.

None of this needs to be lengthy. A few clear lines against each point, specific to the job, is worth far more than a long generic lone working policy that could apply to any job on any day. If you'd like a structured way to build this into your paperwork, our risk assessment step-by-step guide walks through the process from scratch, and lone working fits into that as one more factor to weigh for each task.

If your work involves electrical isolation while working alone, it's also worth reading our guide on safe isolation procedure, since isolation carried out without anyone else able to confirm or respond needs particular care.

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