.gov.uk domains 

The Parish Council Domain Helper Service has been set up to help raise awareness and support to the sector and in this current financial year has funding available.  They will provide guidance at key stages including picking the best Approved Registrar, setting up your new domain and maintaining good practices after your new site has gone live.  

Unfortunately the £100 funding that was offered has now all been allocated and is no longer available. 

Here is a case study from Walberswick Parish Council explaining what was involved including costs.  Please note this was before the Parish Council Domain Service was available.

We are not a large Parish Council (our precept is £20,000) and, in line with established good practice, for a number of years we have required Councillors and staff to keep their Parish Council emails on a separate account to their private email; we all used gmail accounts for this. However we took the decision in late 2023 to move to a .gov.uk domain name (walberswick-pc.gov.uk) and associated email addresses (e.g.  a.lewis@walberswick-pc.gov.uk  ) for all Councillors and staff. There were several drivers of this: 1) We had experience of having an ex-councillor carry on using their Council email address after they stopped being a Councillor and we wanted to be able to “turn off” Council email traffic as soon as someone ceased being a Councillor, 2) we had always been conscious of how easy it would be for someone to start “mimicking” our email addresses and start sending emails as if they were a Councillor, and 3) Our RFO (who looks after several Parish Councils) made us aware of a recommendation from a SALC internal audit that this becoming more strongly recommended and might ultimately lead to needing an explanation on our AGAR as to why we didn’t have a .gov.uk domain.

Our provider:  The providers of .gov.uk domain names are limited (part of the security mechanism) and we chose OneSuffolk (part of Community Action Suffolk) as our provider as they were already a supplier of other services to us and are known for their support of Parish and Town Councils. The IT support from OneSuffolk was excellent and I recommend them as a supplier.

Cost:  Domain name: £138 every two years. Email addresses: £24 each per year, which includes 10GB of email storage for each account.

Domain Setup:  Domain setup was very quick – new the domain was up and running within 48 hours of providing the name we wanted. It is worth noting that if you are not a principle authority, you have to add -pc or -tc to your Parish/Town name to designate you as a Parish or Town Council and this is not negotiable.

Email Setup:  This was straightforward for anyone who has set up email accounts before and with 15 minutes I personally had it up and running on my laptop, iPad and iPhone; email is also available via a webmail interface which means you can pick up email from any device world-wide. The support materials from OneSuffolk were perfectly adequate, although I did add a few tips of my own regarding port settings for other Councillors. It is worth picking the most IT-literate person on your Council to be the support for the set up of everyone else as some people find this very intimidating to do. 

Issues:  We only had two initial issues: 1) Our website is hosted on a different domain and we did not want to move it (the whole village uses it), so OneSuffolk arranged for the new domain to “auto-forward”, which works seamlessly, 2) Initially every email came with a footer that said “scanned by iomartcloud” and a link to the hosting service which we could not remove. I strenuously objected to this advertising being added to a “paid for” service and OneSuffolk were very quick to amend the system in the background so that this no longer appeared. 

Summary:  I am glad we made the switch – it makes us look and feel more professional I think and I like the security of having control over the Council email accounts. The service is obviously an additional cost that we could all do without (it should obviously be centrally funded) but I would recommend changing before it becomes mandatory which is probably only a matter of time. 

Andrew Lewis
Chair, Walberswick Parish Council
a.lewis@walberswick-pc.gov.uk

In 2023, research showed that there were are number of concerns and challenges including:

• awareness of the need and associated risks

• cost - especially for smaller parishes and in particular budgeting for ongoing costs

• perceived complexity

• knowledge and capability

• resistance to change

Councils using the SALC internal audit service will notice that auditors make reference to the use of personal email addresses and reference good practice.  Whilst it is not a legal requirement for councils to have a .gov.uk domain the latest version of the Practitioner's Guide (2025) contains stronger language around the merits of moving with a view to encouraging councils to take this step.   See information and links below.

Councils may keep their existing website and email providers.

Website must comply with these Regulations - use this link to the NALC guide on this (this is currently being updated and will be published in due course).  Look at the Practitioners' Guide 2025 changes go to page 3 section 1.49 and 1.50 as well as page 7 section 5.123.

Look at the changes as published in the 2025 Practitioners' Guide changes  page 3 section 1.47 and page 7 section 5.117, 5.118, 5.119 and 5.120.