28 May 2025The .gov.uk domain was created specially for public sector organisations to use for their websites and emails. As more business is handled online, an important part of your role is to maintain the professional and digital reputation of your parish council.
After setting up the Parish Council Domain Helper Service, the Cyber and Domains Protection team at the Government Digital Service (GDS) helped 1,295 parish councils move over to .gov.uk domains in 2024. This represented a 566% increase over the previous year and there are currently over 4,000 parish councils using .gov.uk domains.
So far in 2025, we’ve onboarded 413 parish councils to .gov.uk domains. Find out why you should join them…
Help professionalise the sector
Being part of the next 1,000 councils to have a .gov.uk domain is valuable to your community because it reassures them that communications from you are legitimate and can be trusted. If all of your council members use .gov.uk email addresses, it is hard for anyone outside of your council to impersonate you because only government public sector organisations can have .gov.uk domains.
The benefits of .gov.uk domains
Using a .gov.uk domain will help you protect council information because it improves the management and control you have over council data. For example, clerks have administrative control over all email accounts in their council when using .gov.uk. Clerks can better implement joiners, movers and leavers processes by controlling staff and councillor accounts. This is important because it will help you meet your obligations to respond to Freedom of Information and Subject Access requests promptly. If your council members are using personal email addresses or generic emails on free platforms, you could lose important council information when a member of staff leaves, making it harder to comply with GDPR rules.
Councils are responsible for protecting their systems, and with cyber scams on the rise, moving to .gov.uk is more important than ever before. The Cyber and Domains Protection team provides a free service that monitors .gov.uk domains for threats and vulnerabilities and helps suppliers fix any issues before they are exploited. This is something that is not available with other domains on the market.
The Parish Council Domains Helper Service can take you through each step of the process. You can email [email protected] or sign up to a free online workshop to talk to members of our team.
You can also read comprehensive guidance on moving your parish council to a .gov.uk domain.
The Parish Council Domains Helper Service Team, Government Digital Service (GDS)
