Updated 30 July 2026
RAMS template for an emergency lighting installation
Twenty-six steps for escape routes, isolation, duration testing and handover.
Method statement: emergency lighting sequence26 steps
- Ask who the responsible person is before you price it, and get the name in writing. It is the employer where the premises are a workplace, otherwise whoever controls them for a business, otherwise the owner.
- Ask to see the fire risk assessment and the escape plan it produced. The luminaire positions follow the escape routes, and the escape routes are not yours to decide.
- Read your own contract for the words maintenance, repair or safety. An obligation of that kind makes you a duty holder for what it covers, alongside the responsible person, not instead of him.
- Walk the routes with the assessment in hand and mark every final exit, change of direction, stair flight, lobby, external route to a place of safety, and every point where losing the normal lighting leaves someone in the dark.
- Mark the points that are not escape routes and still need cover: the plant room, the electrical intake, the lift car, a disabled refuge, a toilet with no borrowed light, a kitchen with an open flame.
- Agree in writing whether this is a self-contained or a central battery system, because it decides your circuit routing, your fire rating and who owns the batteries afterwards.
- Confirm the supply arrangement for each luminaire before ordering, and record which local final circuit each maintained fitting watches, so a lost lighting circuit takes its own emergency fitting with it.
- Check whether the job is notifiable at all before you assume it is. Part P reaches dwellings, the common parts of a building serving dwellings, and installations fed from one, so on a commercial floor there is nothing to notify. In a block of flats there is, and the notice goes in before the work starts.
- Isolate the detector heads on the routes you are drilling, and agree with the responsible person who puts the alarm back into service each evening. Dust in a smoke head empties an occupied building.
- Establish where the compartment lines run and how each penetration will be sealed, using a system tested for the construction you are drilling. You are cutting through the walls of a protected escape route.
- Plan the dust: on-tool extraction, a mask fitted to the person wearing it, and the route cleaned before the building reopens.
- Say who lifts the luminaires and the battery cubicles, from what, and to what height. Overhead work off a step ladder is where the shoulder injuries come from.
- Get the asbestos survey before any of the decisions above are fixed, not after. A management survey does not cover the void you are about to drill, so ask which survey it is, and stop if it is the wrong one.
- Isolate, lock off and prove dead at each fitting position, and treat a corridor luminaire on an unlabelled circuit as live until you have proved which way it is fed.
- Where a circuit genuinely cannot be dead because the premises stay occupied, record why before the work, not after, and name the precautions you will use.
- Plan the access as work at height. A step ladder in a corridor counts, and the escape routes the Fire Safety Order protects are the ones you will be standing in.
- Justify a ladder in the risk assessment rather than in hindsight, and record the two things that justify it: low risk, and either short duration or a site feature you cannot alter.
- Foot, tie or otherwise secure anything portable, and keep the escape route past your access clear while you work, because a blocked corridor is the hazard you were hired to reduce.
- Agree the working hours where the building is occupied, and coordinate with the responsible person before any route is taken out of use for a shift.
- Fix, wire and identify each fitting, and label the circuits and the test facility so the person who tests it next month does not need you on the phone.
- Charge the batteries for the manufacturer's stated period before you test anything, and put that period in the programme rather than in the handover.
- Before you kill the normal supply for a duration test, provide secondary lighting anywhere the loss would put someone at risk, tell the occupier, and stagger the routes so the building is never dark end to end.
- Test the duration route by route with the normal supply off, and log the start and finish time for each.
- Recharge fully before you leave site, and tell the responsible person in writing that the system is not at full duration until it has.
- Hand over both certificates and keep them apart: the electrical installation certificate for the wiring, and the emergency lighting completion certificate for the system. A reviewer will ask for both.
- Hand over the drawing showing every fitting and its purpose, the test log book, the waste transfer note for the old fittings and batteries, and a written statement of what the responsible person must do to keep the system maintained.
Paste into your own document and edit every line.
What does a reviewer check on an emergency lighting job?
| Question | What the provision says | Where |
|---|---|---|
| QuestionWhose duty is the emergency lighting? | What the provision saysThe responsible person's. Articles 5(3) and 5(4) also put duties within the contractor's control where its contract covers maintenance or repair. The original duty remains. | WhereFire Safety Order 2005, art 5 |
| QuestionWhat does the Order actually require? | What the provision saysArticle 14(2)(h) covers routes and exits requiring illumination where needed to protect relevant people. It names no lux level. | WhereFire Safety Order 2005, art 14 |
| QuestionWhere do the monthly and annual tests come from? | What the provision saysNot the Order. Article 17 requires a suitable maintenance system and working equipment but sets no interval. BS 5266-1 supplies the test intervals. | WhereFire Safety Order 2005, art 17 |
| QuestionDoes it reach a block of flats? | What the provision saysYes in the common parts. Article 6 excludes domestic premises but includes the structure, external walls and common parts of a building containing two or more homes. | WhereFire Safety Order 2005, art 6 |
HSE says silica may be responsible for the deaths of over 500 people each year who have worked in construction. Reg 12(6A) only bites where Part P applies, and Part P reaches dwellings and their common parts, not a commercial floor. Secondary lighting: CDM reg 35(3). The responsible person: art 3. Live work: EAWR reg 14. Ladders: WAH Schedule 6.
Does the Order reach Scotland?
No. The Order is England and Wales only under art 1(4). Scotland uses Part 3 and its separate reg 13(2)(h).
What do the steps leave to you?
Your hazards, controls and residual ratings, and the fitting schedule, which the fire risk assessment drives. The Word file here is the general electrician RAMS. If the job includes a board change, the £29 consumer unit RAMS is task-specific and editable.
