14 May 2025SLCC is aware that some clerks and their councils may have been confused or concerned about emails received by them from Parish UK, which is the trading name of Parish Services Ltd, a company based in Portsmouth. The Parish UK website is built around publicly available data drawn from sources including the Office for National Statistics and Wikipedia. Under each ‘parish’ is a business listing, which reflects information in the public domain. Emails from Parish UK have sought payment to maintain this business listing.
The individual ‘parish’ sites also include information relating to the council, education, business, planning, property, heritage and farming. Some recipients of these emails, including parish councils and businesses based in parishes, have been concerned about any association which may be inferred with the parish council.
Parish Services Ltd have previously stated of their website:
The PARISH.UK Network is not a scam. It is a Community Action Initiative (not run by Parish Councils) which includes a low cost online business directory for each UK Parish that local businesses can choose to be included within should they wish. The pages receive high local visitor traffic, due to the unique data presented for each Parish. The listings for business do exist in the business directory pages already, so we simply ask a business if they wish to keep their listing. There is no obligation to do so and a business can choose to either renew or cancel or let the listing expire naturally.
There are currently 114 reviews of Parish.uk on Trustpilot, with an overall rating of 1.2 out of 5 (https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/parish.uk 08/05/25).
If you have a concern about any email you receive, from any source, which you may consider to be fraudulent or an attempt at ‘passing off’, you can report those concerns to Action Fraud. Action Fraud is the UK’s national reporting centre for cyber-crime where you should report fraud if you have been scammed, defrauded or experienced cyber-crime.
SLCC urges all members to manage and mitigate risks to their council’s activities, including unsolicited emails from any source.
