ClearDays Research · July 2026, revised 7 September 2026

The State of Parish Council Websites 2026

Public-sector websites are legally required to meet accessibility standards — a duty referenced in Assertion 10 of the AGAR that every English council signs. We tested how the sector is actually doing, by auditing the homepage of every one of the 5,552 parish and town council .gov.uk domains on the Cabinet Office’s official register. We believe this is the largest survey of the sector’s web estate ever published.

Key findings

What this means

None of this is about blaming clerks — most councils are one part-time person with no budget, using whatever website they inherited. But residents who rely on assistive technology have the same right to read an agenda as everyone else, and the law says so. The encouraging news: the most common failures in this data are also the cheapest to fix — a declared page language, link wording, and a skip link are each a few minutes’ work for whoever maintains the site. Beyond the headline figures, 43% of live sites (2,094) offer no main content landmark, so assistive technology cannot jump past the navigation to the page itself. These are warnings rather than hard failures, but they are the difference between a site that is merely legal and one that is actually easy to use.

One finding deserves separate mention. At least 520 councils run sites that serve residents normally but refuse automated requests with an HTTP 403 response, usually through a security service their web host enabled by default. That is not a fault in itself — but it means those clerks cannot test their own site with any automated accessibility checker, ours included, and cannot easily produce evidence that they tried. If a checker reports that your site refused the connection, the site is not broken; ask your web provider to allow accessibility testing tools.

Check your own council — free

We do not publish individual councils’ results. Any clerk can check their own site in ten seconds with our free accessibility checker — no sign-up, and the report explains each fix in plain English. To stay compliant as the site changes, ClearDays Monitor repeats the check monthly and keeps a dated evidence trail.

Methodology & limitations

Source: the Cabinet Office register of .gov.uk domain names (31 March 2026 edition, CSV), filtered to parish and town council naming patterns — 5,566 entries containing 5,552 unique domains, every one of which we checked against that CSV. Each homepage was requested in July 2026 with an identified research crawler over HTTPS at the bare domain. Because that single test cannot tell a dead site from one we simply failed to reach, every failure was retested on 1 September 2026: with an ordinary browser user-agent, on the www host, over plain HTTP, and at the obvious alternative addresses — the same name on .org.uk, .co.uk, .com and .uk, and the parish platforms run by Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire (the only two counties that operate one). “Does not work” means the registered address failed every one of those. This surveys registered domains, not councils. Where we found a council at another address we required the page to identify itself as that parish’s council: a village website, a local school or a parked page is not evidence the council is online, and matches failing that test were discarded. So the 95 located is a floor, and the 325 remaining are “no site found”, not “no site exists” — a smaller authority may also publish lawfully on its billing authority’s website under the Transparency Code. Live homepages — including those reachable only on www or over HTTP — were tested with automated heuristics against a subset of WCAG 2.2 criteria (page language, title, mobile viewport and zoom, image alt attributes, heading structure, main landmark, skip link, link text). Automated checks understate problems — they cannot judge colour contrast, scanned-PDF documents or content quality — so the true picture is likely worse than reported here. Homepage-only: deeper pages were not crawled. Councils using non-.gov.uk domains (roughly half the sector) are not included. Aggregate data available to journalists and county associations on request: contact@cleardays.org.uk.

Corrections, 1 September 2026: the first version of this report said 1,359 domains (24%) served no working website. That was wrong, and wrong in one direction, because a single HTTPS request to the bare domain was treated as proof that a council had no website. Retesting found that 537 of those domains had merely refused our crawler (mostly bot protection returning 403), 171 answer on their www host or over plain HTTP, and 89 councils are online at another address entirely. The corrected figure was 410 registered addresses (7.4%) that do not work, of which 321 are councils we could not locate online at all.

Correction, 2 September 2026: our accessibility checks were counting<img> tags found anywhere in a page’s HTML, including inside HTML comments. Many council sites ship dormant, commented-out markup — commonly a pre-staged banner for a national mourning period — that a browser never renders and no screen reader ever reaches. Counting it inflated every accessibility figure on this page, the “images with no alternative text” figure worst of all: of a sample of 555 sites we had flagged as failing, 503 turned out to have zero real missing-alt images once comments were excluded. We fixed the checker to ignore comments, scripts and stylesheets, then re-ran it across all 5,142 live sites. Every accessibility figure on this page reflects that corrected re-run. The largest change: sites with at least one hard accessibility failure fell from 19% to 9%, and images with no alternative text fell from 14% to 4%.

Correction, 7 September 2026: found while preparing direct outreach to specific councils, so the standard we held it to was higher: could a stranger check this exact number themselves and find it right. An <img> tag with no src attribute at all renders nothing to any visitor, sighted or not — most commonly a text-formatting artifact from an embedded Facebook feed plugin, not a real image. Our checker was still counting these toward “images with no alternative text”. For some sites the effect was total: every one of their recorded missing-alt images turned out to be this artifact and nothing else. Fixed and re-run across all 5,142 live sites. The change is smaller than the previous correction — this pattern is far less common than the commented-out banner was — but every figure on this page again reflects the corrected numbers. We have left all three correction notes in place rather than quietly amending the numbers.

ClearDays builds statutory paperwork tools for parish and town council clerks — including publication to accessible pages by default. About ClearDays.