ClearDays Research · July 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 5,566 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
1,359 (24%)
registered .gov.uk domains serving no working website
The council pays for an official domain that times out, refuses connections or errors.
88%
of live sites have at least one accessibility issue
Only 504 sites — 11% — passed every automated check cleanly.
20%
have at least one hard failure
Content that is simply unavailable to some disabled users.
50%
lack a skip-navigation link
Keyboard and screen-reader users must tab through the entire menu on every page. (2,123 sites)
34%
have no main content landmark
Assistive technology cannot jump to the content. (1,438 sites)
16%
have images with no alternative text
Photographs, posters and scanned notices that are invisible to screen readers. (694 sites)
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 — alt text, link wording, a skip link, and publishing documents as text rather than scans.
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We do not publish individual councils’ results.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.
Methodology & limitations
Source: the Cabinet Office register of .gov.uk domain names (31 March 2026 edition), filtered to parish and town council naming patterns (5,566 domains). Each domain’s homepage was requested once, politely, with an identified research crawler, in July 2026. “No working website” means the domain did not return a successful response within 8 seconds. Live homepages 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.
ClearDays builds statutory paperwork tools for parish and town council clerks — including publication to accessible pages by default. About ClearDays.