The Government Cyber Unit Cyber Services team is pleased to share that the Parish Council Domains Helper Service won the Digital Transformation Project of the Year 2025 at the BCS UK IT Industry Awards.
The team took on the responsibility for helping to improve the digital health of parish councils, which are the foundational tier of UK democracy. Historically, many councils have poor cyber security and low digital adoption.
Before we launched our service in 2024, 80% of the 10,000 English parish councils were still using non-government domains instead of .gov.uk. Coupled with this, 66% of councils were also using free, personal email addresses for official council business. Our aim was to not only onboard councils to .gov.uk but to increase security practices and professionalism across the sector.
Winning this industry award caps off an exciting 18 months of hard work, which has seen the service go from an idea on a spreadsheet to a live service.
Getting to the heart of the problem during our discovery
The idea sprung to life in 2023, under the direction of Simon Foster, Head of the Cyber Services team. Grace Hernandez, Portfolio Lead put out a tender on the Digital Marketplace to recruit a team to work on the project.
As with every discovery, we started small by focusing on 10 parish councils, carrying out online surveys, workshops and one-to-one interviews to uncover barriers to adopting .gov.uk domains. We discovered 4 main pain points that were preventing .gov.uk adoption across the sector.
- The price of a .gov.uk domain was high when compared to alternative domains like .co.uk and org.uk. This was because the .gov.uk registry was on a legacy contract and the wholesale price of a single domain was £110+ VAT, not including any registrar markups.
- There was a lack of awareness that the .gov.uk domain was created especially for use by public sector organisations and the branding and security benefits associated with the domain.
- Clerks had little time and resources to make the move to .gov.uk. In many cases, they were working part-time under intense pressure across multiple parish councils and had no support from central government.
- Using .gov.uk was not a legal requirement for parish councils. Although .gov.uk was specifically created for use by public sector organisations, parish councils were not mandated to use, so they were unaware of its importance.
Moving onto the Alpha phase, we were able to:
- help move 98 councils across to .gov.uk
- secure £100 of funding for the first 1000 councils
- run in-depth workshops for users to get more information
- publish a list of 29 registrars who committed to providing extra support to councils
How we onboarded 1,000 parish councils during the Beta phase
Over the course of 2024, Tim, Will and Steph worked on iterating the service based on feedback from workshops, surveys, presentations and incoming stats. During the 2024 calendar year, the team:
- processed over 6000 emails to our [email protected] inbox
- ran 163 in-depth guidance sessions (attended by 1,032 councils)
- created over 30 webinars, newsletters, blogs, articles and recorded a podcast
- presented at over 100 meetings with partners, county officers and regional associations
Sandra and Karen built valuable relationships with the Society of Local Council Clerks (SLCC) and the National Association of Local Councils (NALC). This culminated in achieving a major milestone where they strengthened wording in NALC’s Practitioners’ Guide 2025. This helped to increase .gov.uk adoption in the live phase by clarifying its importance to councils.
One of the more challenging aspects of the service delivery was the requirement to process and receipt all of the invoices for the funding. Grace engaged with internal senior finance business partners to agree an approach and worked on processing and receipting over 1000 invoices. This required weekly cross-checks with the delivery team to ensure the domain registrations were live, before handing out the funding.
As you can imagine there was a lot of back and forth, having to chase invoices and financial teams required a lot of effort to make sure that everything was paid on time
Adding to the complexity of the Beta phase, I was also running the .gov.uk Registry migration project and building a brand new Get Approval to use .gov.uk domain name service.
The Parish Council Domains Helper Service was dependent on these 2 services being launched on time in July 2024, so parish council domains could benefit from the renegotiated £10 wholesale cost and get their domains registered and working. Both of those projects ran to time and budget – launching on the 26 June 2024.
Year one stats of the Parish Council Domains Helper Service
The judging panel was particularly impressed with the impact of the service. The headline figures included:
- onboarding 1,295 councils during the year (a 566% increase year-on-year)
- reaching our 1,000 parish councils target 66 days ahead of schedule
- surpassing our target by 30%
- having a service rating feedback of 9 out of 10
Sustaining our momentum for the live service
Once our fixed-term contract with our supplier ended in March 2025, the team working on the Parish Council Domains Helper Service reduced from 8 full-time staff down to 1.5 full-time people.
There was uncertainty as to how well the service would perform when resourcing was cut by 80%. Added to this, we no longer had the carrot of giving out £100 funding, as budgets were diverted to other high priority projects. Even with these restrictions, we were set with an ambitious target of onboarding 750 parish councils during 2025.
I handed over the day-to-day Service Owner reins to Emma Dwan who has done an excellent job of building on momentum from the launch year. This has resulted in us smashing through our targets thanks to the strong foundation of the service. Together we’ve:
- run 29 workshops for clerks to help them move to .gov.uk
- published moving your parish council to a .gov.uk domain self service guidance (over 3000 page unique views)
- processed over 1275 .gov.uk parish council domains
- had monthly check-in with Registrars
- presented at the SLCC National Conference and to various County Associations
- onboarded over 50% of parish councils onto .gov.uk
At its current rate – the Parish Domains Helper Service can theoretically complete the on-boarding of all 10,000 parish councils within 5 years. That’s 15 years faster than if we would have done nothing. However, we do expect new challenges as some councils have zero budget, so we will have to get creative with ways to help as we creep closer to our target.
As more parish councils join the .gov.uk ecosystem, our attention is increasingly turning to help them increase their overall cyber security.
If you’d like to learn more you can email us at [email protected].
