Parish Council
In the 2025 Practitioners’ Guide for Digital and Data Compliance new rules were introduced for Parish Councils that stated that from April 2026 they must use an authority-owned domain for emails and websites. Our current domain, Sticklepath.org, which was set up and shared with the village, is owned and registered to Spencer Stallion, who administers our website through a 3rd party hosting organisation.
Our website must also meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2AA, which means that, for example, content cannot just be available as an image, there must be a written html version of it that can be read by screen readers. Since other organisations and people use the website, this would be difficult to enforce and would result in extra work for the Clerk (and other participants) in ensuring that the guidelines were followed. The site has a few problems, but not huge ones, and could be amended to comply. It also has an accessibility statement which means that it is technically compliant if the statement was updated.
The guidelines indicate that best practice (but not essential) is to have a .gov domain, which not only increases public confidence and indicates the status of the Council, but is more secure as it is checked by a government IT department and cannot be ‘spoofed’ (people can’t set up an alternative site with a similar name). In order to take advantage of a limited time grant, the Council have secured the domain sticklepathparish.gov.uk until January 2028 at a cost of £10. From then on it will be £30 + VAT per year. For more details, and historical details and costings, see the previous December 2024 report on this website.
Although the website is shared with the village, the Parish Council pay all the costs associated with it, currently £189.50 a year. The Council pages are quite hidden on the website. The copyright statement on the site names ‘Sticklepath Village’, which is not an organisation!
This report attempts to lay out the options available to the Council, while considering the needs of the village, and the costs. It is being considered at this time in order to include any changes in costs in the 2026/27 budget which is discussed in the November and December meetings. Inflation and rises in supplier costs have not been factored into any of the figures below. I have obtained quotes from 3 suppliers. I have also obtained a quote for email and storage, but it is more expensive than the current options, as our emails are included in the hosting.
One other point to consider is that if there are any moves to merge parish councils, we would need a combined council website which would change all the options again!
This option would mean that the Council was going against the government guidelines. As the Proper Officer of the Council I cannot recommend this option, however it is the Council who make the decision. Our internal auditor and the monitoring officer at West Devon Borough Council could point out that we are not following the law, and there could be uncomfortable press releases denigrating the Council. If the internal audit fails, it may result in an external audit, causing extra costs and work. However, it is unlikely that there would be more serious consequences.
Annual Cost: £190 a year
Spencer Stallion has indicated that he is happy to change the registration to the name of Sticklepath Parish Council, we would then be in accordance with the main guideline, but there would still be the accessibility issues, so we would still not be compliant. We would also need the agreement of other interested parties, such as Emma Bell who helped to set up the website originally.
One-Off Cost: £0
Annual Cost: £190
This would be compliant with the new guidelines.
There is guidance about checking website accessibility on the SLCC website, but it takes time and effort. The current site does not comply, so would require changes to the design, and does need a new accessibility policy (current one dated 2020 saying there will be a new website in 2021, but also saying it was reviewed in 2023!). There would need to be expenditure on either Clerk overtime, the current provider or an external organisation (which could cost about £300). Some websites say it is cheaper to start again than to try and enforce accessibility on an old site (but they are probably selling you a new website!).
The Clerk would require full admin access to amend the headers and footers.
One-Off Cost: Clerk est. £150, external £300.
Annual Cost: £190
This would be compliant with the new guidelines, but could be messy.
In this option the current website would become sticklepathparish.gov.uk and our emails would become e.g. clerk@sticklepathparish.gov.uk. This would still incur the costs of improving accessibility, and might produce a conflict in allowing other organisations to publish posts which would then need to be checked by the Clerk for accessibility. The Clerk would be responsible for all content on the site under the gov.uk rules, but we would be more secure from cyber-attacks. The Parish Council would need to be more central on the home page, as it would be a government site, which could not contain ‘advertising’. Non-commercial organisations such as the Village Hall and other voluntary groups could still have their pages. We would need to keep the old domain registered and redirect traffic to the new one. Luckily the current 3rd party host 20i is one of the few registrars who can host gov.uk domains.
One-Off Cost: Awaiting response.
Annual Cost: £190 + £36 (new domain) + possible extra Clerk work.
This would be compliant with the guidelines and follow best practice, but would be more expensive.
To follow best practice we could move our part of the website, still post links on the old website to keep links to the community. This would enable us to have an accessibility compliant website, with more focused content. We would then have to consider whether we continued to support the community by contributing to the domain registration and hosting. It would seem incorrect use of public money to pay for both websites, but we could ask the Village Hall and other organisations such as St. Mary’s to support the admin of the old site, and just pay for the domain registration and hosting.
One-off Cost: One supplier has said they will do this for free if we host with them.
Annual Cost: £360 for our domain, and £90 donation to community site.
This would be compliant with the guidelines and best practice, and would be more cost-efficient for the Council.
We move to a new fully compliant website, there would be less admin for the Clerk in keeping the links, and we let the other organisations keep their own website.
One-Off Cost: One supplier has said they will do this for free, but their hosting is more expensive.
Cost spread over 5 years: Approx £500 per year including VAT.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you can think of any other options or wish any of the terminology to be explained.
Other Links:
https://www.adido-digital.co.uk/blog/how-long-should-a-website-last/
https://devonalc.org.uk/news/understanding-your-councils-responsibility-towards-an-accessible-website/ (will require your DALC login)
Sally Fullwood
Sticklepath Parish Clerk
August 2025
One-off cost: £0
Ran an accessibility tool earlier today and found a handful of hard issues and dozens of soft issues – all very easy to fix. Estimated one-off cost: £100 – £200 (2 – 4 hours @ £50 p/h)
I would not advise this option.
Estimated one-off cost: £200 – £400 (includes accessibility work/fixes indicated in option 3)
Estimated cost of creating a new, standalone site, based on the current design, (with accessibility work/fixes): £600 – £800.
A discount for hosting could be applied for multiple sites.
As above, (if design based on current website).
Keep current site; change to a WordPress Multisite (allows multiple websites within one WordPress installation). Map .gov domain to Parish Council site, effectively creating two websites within one installation. Ongoing hosting cost would stay the same.
Estimated one-off cost: £400 – £600 (includes accessibility work/fixes indicated in option 3, moving of Parish Council content to new site, and setup of .gov email accounts). *this cost is based on using the existing design/theme with very minor tweaks.