What are the legal requirements for a parish council website
The legal requirements for a Parish Council or a small government agency are quite simple and relate to Transparency while maintaining GDPR rules (Data Privacy).
A parish council is required to publish the proceedings of public meetings and issues that relate to the community. The contact information and a list of those serving on the Council should also be provided.
What this means for the Parish Council
As a Parish Council you must maintain a website. This website does not have to be complicated and only needs to provide a means for a member of the public to view your financial data so as to provide the required transparency. This transparency is to allow the public to confirm that their taxes are being used appropriately.
Minutes and agendas of past and upcoming meetings are required to be posted, or at least a description of how these can be obtained from the clerk. Minutes of meetings and their agendas are required to be kept in any case. Publishing them on your website is a nice thing to have.
The Parish Council website can contain additional information at the discretion of the Parish Council, however it must contain details of the Council Members and a clear means to contact the council. This information can just contain the names of the Councilors and the only address that is required is one for the Clerk of the Council. This information is also availible to the general public on District Council websites.
Under EU rules, if you site uses cookies you are legally supposed to inform your visitors and give them the option to "opt-out" if they have a problem with privacy in that regard. As the UK has left the EU this may not be a concern, but it is good practice to make your cookie use known to the visitor.
This website does not use cookies, so there is no need for a disclosure.
Email addresses and Contact Information
There should be a clear method of communicating with the clerk of the Council. The clerk will have access to email and street addresses of all the Council Members.
You will see that Parish Councils will frequently post the names, addresses and even photographs of the Council Members. As far as the author is aware this is NOT A REQUIREMENT under your obligations as a Parish Council.
GDPR is making sure that you are careful with personal data, and that you publish a policy regarding how any data collected will be used and how it will be destroyed. While this is a gross over simplifacation it is not the purpose of this site to explain GDPR in detail, links to the official authorities can be found below.
Transparency is the posting of financial data, such as items with a value of over £100 that form part of the accounts for the council and the accounts themselves.
Minutes from Meetings and Agenda
In addition to the legal requirement to be transparent with the finances of the Parish Council there is a general obligation to post minutes and agenda for meetings.
This is the primary means for members of the general public to be informed of the operation of the Parish Council. These documents can contain more detailed information relating to the finances and items of interest to the community. Members of the community are free to attend meetings held by the Parish Council and encouraged to participate.
Communication via the Parish Council website is nice to have but not mandatory. It is a lot more work for the webmaster to provide on-line forms and to make sure that they are not abused. If you require this sort of facility and you are not familar with email and spam reduction techniques, you are better off using a 3rd party solution and/or a CMS system such as Wordpress.
Background to this page
I started looking at these issues when I was looking to replace the local Parish Council website with a site that I had designed myself. Up to that time the Parish Council website was hosted through a free service run by EssexInfo.net.
Since launching my own designed website I see that there are others that are interested in the legal requirements for such a website. I initialy proposed that I would help others who were in the position of re-vamping their Parish Council websites on the closing of the EssexInfo service. This did not come to pass as there seemed to be no interest in this endeavour. However, I learnt a lot from my research into the design and implementation.
Research
At the time of starting this project I looked at what commercial alternatives there were to EssexInfo.net and found a number of companies that were offering these services.
When making a search for this topic I came across parishcouncilwebsites.org.uk. They seem to specialise in this issue (the legal requirements that is).
In conclusion, I think that it not that important as your governing council, in our case Braintree District Council (this could change going forward from 2025), are not going to check up on you!
parishcouncilwebsites.org.uk
a.k.a. NetWise UK. They ofer 3 packages, recomended for Parish Councils, the Basic package is £399 setup and £100 per year on-going.
GDPR and Cookies
One of the important aspects of GDPR compliance is your websites policy on cookies. You will be well aware of the pop-up messages asking for your consent when you visit websites.
The use of Google, when you make a search and other Google related activities, are almost certainly depedant on the use of cookies.
My websites do not use cookies for collecting information on visitors. However, I do use Google Analytics and I am presuming that will negate my compliance. If this is the case I will have to make a template without the Google Analytics tracking code. Cookiebot offers a free checking service for GDPR compliance,
Depending on the result from Cookiebot I will make the Parish Council pages Google Analytics tracking free.
Cookiebot.com
Cookiebot.com is one of many companies that will offer you solutions to allow you to let your visitors choose how they would like you to handle cookies.
Cookiebot advertise a "free" check for GDPR Compliance I made two submissions to check this website, I received no report. Either they determined that I am not someoe who they can sell their serivices to or I am actually compliant.
"Must-Haves" and "Wants"
There is a difference here.
When I started out on this venture I was more concerned with coming up with a solution to the fact that the village Parish Council needs a website as it had been told by the County Council that it needed one. The first attempt was to use a "free" solution from EssexInfo.net.
When EssexInfo stopped this service I looked to see what other solutions there were. I decided that I had the skills to build my own. It was also another opportunity to revisit CMS "Content Management Systems".
I did find another solution that was from a local developer, VCS, Hugh Frostic from Great Bentley.
Mobile Access
In my opinion this is the prime "Must-have" as the site is most likely to be accessed from a mobile phone if at all. I admit that I have only just got this to work to my satisfaction. Even then, I am not sure that the visitor to my sites will still understand how the navigation works.
In most case of the design of a Parish Council or Village Hall website there is not a lot of information that needs to be presented. This makes the navigation task a lot simpler. All that is needed is a few information pages and possibly the posting of rules, financials, meeting records etc. It is unlikely that these pages will ever be accessed!
A "Community" Website
Ideally this would take the form of a fully Interactive Forum. The "Members" can "Join" and there is a means by which they can communicate between themselves. There are solutions to do this and they could include Facebook and Wordpress can be configured as a fully fledged Blog.
However, if this what you require be aware that it is a lot of work and you are far better off looking for a 3rd party solution.
Obtaining Funding
You may be told that if you have a website it will be easier to obtain funding. Grants may be given to you if you show that you are a legit operation and if you are given money they will expect that you will give them credit on your website. This is a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation.
It has not been proven that this is the case.
Getting your Website found
To get your website to be found when an Internet user makes a search then you need to either find a platform that is regularly spidered by the search engines such as Google and Bing or you need someone who knows about SEO