For parish and town councils in England
Your council’s website, and the paperwork that proves it complies.
Publishing your agendas, accounts, spending and asset register on a public website is a legal duty. From the 2025‑26 annual return, your council also has to sign a statement confirming its website meets accessibility law. Parish in a Box does both, and hands you the evidence.
£30 to £60 a month. No setup fee. One month’s notice to leave, and you keep your content.
The clerk is carrying this alone
Most parish clerks work part time, often under ten hours a week, and the website is somewhere near the bottom of the list. It is also the one part of the job that is inspected.
The duty itself is not vague. The Smaller Authorities (Transparency Requirements) (England) Regulations 2015 say an authority in scope of the Transparency code must publish the information in that code, in the form and on the occasions the code specifies. The code says it must go on a website that is publicly accessible free of charge. There are seven categories of information, three different publishing deadlines, and six mandatory fields for every entry in the asset register.
What has changed is that somebody now checks. The Practitioners’ Guide 2025 added Assertion 10, Digital and data compliance, to the annual governance statement. From the 2025‑26 return onwards, the chair and the clerk sign a declaration covering the council’s website accessibility, its published documentation, its data protection, its IT policy and whether its email sits on a domain the council actually owns. The internal auditor reviews it.
The honest position for a lot of councils is that they cannot evidence a “Yes”. Their site is on a builder subdomain, the clerk’s address is a personal Gmail, the accessibility statement was written in 2020 and never reviewed, and last year’s accounts went up in September rather than by 1 July.
Three things we do differently
01
Structured data, not a folder of PDFs
You type a payment in once and it appears in the right year’s table, formatted with the four fields the code requires. Your asset register has six fields because the code names six fields. Nothing is a scanned document that a screen reader cannot open, which is how most councils quietly fail accessibility.
02
The deadlines are watched for you
Agendas need three clear days’ notice. Draft minutes need to be up within a month. Annual accounts, the governance statement, the audit report, spending, members and assets are all due by 1 July. We hold every date and tell you what is late, before your auditor does.
03
An evidence pack, with citations
One page you print and send to your internal auditor. Every requirement, whether it is met, the evidence, and the paragraph it comes from. Not a supplier saying “we are compliant” — your own published record, checked line by line.
What you actually get
- A complete website: home, meetings and minutes, your council, finance and transparency, contact
- An accessibility statement generated from your own record, in the form the Government Digital Service recommends
- A public compliance report your residents and your auditor can both read
- Built to WCAG 2.2 AA: semantic headings, keyboard navigation, visible focus, 4.5:1 text contrast, no colour-only meaning
- Your content exported as open data whenever you ask, so you are never locked in
- UK hosting, daily backups, and a person who answers the email
Look round a compliant council site, then compare its report with one from a council that has fallen behind. Both are demonstration sites with fictional content.
Pricing
One price, everything included. No setup fee, no charge for support, no charge for the compliance reporting.
Parish
£30per month + VAT
For councils with annual turnover not exceeding £25,000.
- Full website, hosted and maintained
- Transparency code register, built in
- Automatic accessibility statement
- Agenda and minutes deadline tracking
- Assertion 10 evidence pack
- Email support, answered by a person
Most councils choose this
Town
£45per month + VAT
For larger parishes and town councils above £25,000.
- Everything in Parish
- Local Government Transparency Code 2015 register
- Committees and sub-committees
- Up to 10 editor accounts
- Members-only area for draft papers
- We apply for your .gov.uk domain
Town Plus
£60per month + VAT
For councils with staff, assets and a full committee structure.
- Everything in Town
- Content migration from your old site
- One-to-one training for the clerk
- Room and allotment booking forms
- Named contact, telephone support
- Annual accessibility audit report
Prices exclude VAT. Billed monthly by card, or annually by invoice if your council prefers to pay on a purchase order. Checkout runs in Stripe test mode in this build — no card is charged.
Start with the free check
Run the checker on the website you already have. Every requirement, whether you meet it, and the paragraph it comes from — no charge, no sign-up, and no obligation to move. Do it now without leaving your details, or give us your email and we will send the report over with a note on what to fix first.
Where these requirements come from
We would rather you checked. Every legal statement on this page traces to one of these.
- The duty to publish is statutory. The Smaller Authorities (Transparency Requirements) (England) Regulations 2015, SI 2015/494, reg 2(1): “An authority to which the Code applies must publish the information specified in the Code in the manner and form and on the occasions specified in the Code.”
- What must be published, and by when. Transparency code for smaller authorities, Department for Communities and Local Government, 17 December 2014. Applies to parish councils in England with annual turnover not exceeding £25,000 (para 6). Seven categories of information (para 10); annual items by 1 July following the accounting year (para 11); draft minutes within one month (para 29); agendas three clear days before (para 30); publication on “a website which is publicly accessible free of charge” (para 32).
- Assertion 10. Practitioners’ Guide 2025, Smaller Authorities Proper Practices Panel, paras 1.48–1.54 and 5.121–5.128. Assertion 10 “will not appear on the AGAR until 2025-26”. It requires websites to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and the accessibility regulations (1.49), to carry the documentation required by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Transparency code (1.50), and requires the authority to have an IT policy (1.54). Para 1.26 requires “a generic email account hosted on an authority owned domain”. Published by the Smaller Authorities Audit Appointments and SLCC.
- Accessibility. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, SI 2018/952, and the Government Digital Service guidance. Local government bodies are in scope. Schools and nurseries are partially exempt; parish councils are not named as exempt. Where full compliance would be a disproportionate burden, the regulations require a documented assessment — and an accessibility statement is required either way.
- Council numbers. Approximately 10,000 parish and town councils in England, per the National Association of Local Councils.
Two things we will not tell you. First, there is no fine attached to the Transparency code — the consequence of not publishing is a qualified audit, an Assertion 10 you cannot honestly sign, and a resident who can see the gap. Accessibility is enforced separately, by the Equality and Human Rights Commission under the Equality Act 2010. Second, we are not your lawyers or your auditors. This is a documentation tool. If your council has a genuinely difficult question about its statutory duties, ask your county association, your internal auditor or a solicitor.