Five Cumbrian Parish & Town Council Websites

Project · Parish & Town Council Websites

A parish or town council website has to do two jobs: legal compliance (WCAG 2.2 AA, Assertion 10, the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018) and practical service (residents and inspectors finding the document they need quickly). Many council sites still hand-publish PDFs into a long scrolling list. That is not accessible and it is not usable. Our council sites give every document its own HTML page, single-click access from anywhere on the site, and a workflow the clerk can actually run alone.

Millom Without Parish Council came to us with an inherited site where documents had been hand-posted as PDFs into a long undifferentiated list. We rebuilt the entire archive — every legally required document was re-extracted, reformatted as an accessible HTML page, retitled to a consistent convention, and published correctly. One document at a time, from scratch.

The rebuilt site at millomwithoutparishcouncil.gov.uk is now one of the most publicly engaged council sites in our portfolio — a regular Out and About newsletter, an active news section, and a complete fully-searchable document archive with single-click access from every page.

Millom Town Council

Millom Town Council commissioned a full rebuild ahead of the Assertion 10 compliance deadline. The site uses the same single-click access architecture, the same WCAG 2.2 AA standard, and the same HTML-page-per-document model. The clerk uses our AI document workflow — documents go in, the system cleans them, retitles them, checks for accessibility issues, and presents them for the clerk approval before publishing. millomtowncouncil.uk is now an active and publicly engaged council site.

Three small rural Cumbrian parish councils — Eskdale in the Western Lake District, Bootle on the South West coast, Whicham serving the Silecroft-to-Whicham coastal stretch — share a clerk who commissioned all three rebuilds for Assertion 10 compliance in one programme. The same architecture applies, but the AI document workflow runs by email rather than the desktop tool: the clerk emails documents to us, we run them through the system, and publish on their behalf.

The output across all five sites is identical — correctly named, accessible HTML pages, searchable by content, single-click access to every document type.

.gov.uk

We are JISC-approved .gov.uk registrars. Every council we build for gets their official .gov.uk address registered through us as part of the build. Residents and inspectors recognise a .gov.uk address as the genuine council site, not a third-party imitation. The domain is registered to the council itself, not to the agency, and it stays with the council whatever happens next.

The accessible HTML output is what residents, inspectors, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission see. But the part that makes a council website actually sustainable is the workflow the clerk uses to publish each document. Document arrives in any format — PDF, Word, scan, email body — the AI workflow extracts the content, applies the council naming convention, generates accessibility-correct markup, and produces a ready-to-publish HTML page for the clerk to review.

No fighting the CMS, no manual cleanup, no PDF accessibility audits. The compliance work is built into the workflow itself.

What this proves

Five Cumbrian parish and town councils now run on the same accessible, .gov.uk-registered, AI-document-workflow-backed architecture. The model is repeatable and we build to it as standard for any council commission. WCAG 2.2 AA, Assertion 10 ready, clerk-runnable, .gov.uk registered, AI document workflow either local or email-based depending on the council scale.