A parish council and a village hall are two different kinds of body, and that difference is what decides what has to go on the website. A parish council is a statutory public authority. It has publication duties that come from legislation and from central government guidance, and those duties apply whether or not the council has ever thought about them. A village hall is usually run by a charity or an unincorporated association, governed by its own governing document (the constitution, rules or trust deed that sets out how it operates).

Why this matters for whoever runs the site

Nobody hands a new clerk or a new committee member a single list of what the website is legally required to carry. Parish council duties tend to surface piecemeal, from an internal auditor's checklist, a district council reminder, or a complaint. Village hall obligations are often just assumed. The result in both cases is the same: a site that is missing something nobody noticed was missing, because the person who last updated it did not know it was required.

Where the specific list lives

The requirements themselves, each one with the body it comes from and the date it was checked, are set out further down this page. Treat that list as the working checklist and this section as the reason the two kinds of organisation are covered separately: a parish council's publication duties are not optional in the way a village hall's expectations sometimes are, and conflating the two leads committees to either over-publish or miss something a district auditor will ask about. Anyone handing over the site to a successor should pass on which category their organisation falls into along with the usual access details covered in what to get from whoever is leaving, before they stop answering emails, and where the governing document sits, since it often settles disputed cases either way.

A parish council and a village hall committee sit under different rules, but both have a duty to make certain information public, and for a parish council that duty comes from statute. Missing one of these is not usually a dramatic problem, but it is the sort of thing an auditor, a member of the public or a district council asks about, and it is easier to fix before someone asks.

Parish councils: the Transparency Code

Smaller authorities (parish and town councils below the audit threshold) are covered by the Local Government Transparency Code. It sets out categories of information that must be published, and for a council with a website, the website is where this goes.

• Agendas and minutes of full council and committee meetings
• The annual return and internal audit report
• Councillor names, and the ward or area each represents
• Details of public land and building assets the council holds
• Contracts and payments above the threshold set in the Code

The Local Government Transparency Code 2015 sets out the categories in full, including the exact payment threshold (gov.uk, checked September 2026). A council should confirm the current threshold and category list there before publishing, since the figures can be revised.

Parish councils: the general power and openness rules

Separately from the Transparency Code, the Local Government Act 1972 and later openness regulations require that agendas be published in advance of a meeting and that minutes be made available once approved. A council website is the practical way most parishes now meet this, though the statutory duty itself does not name the website specifically (Local Government Act 1972, s.100, checked September 2026). Confirm the current wording at legislation.gov.uk before treating this as settled.

What a village hall has to publish

A village hall run by an independent charity does not have the same statutory publication duty as a parish council, because the requirement above applies to local authorities, not to charities. Where the hall is a registered charity, its own governing document may set out what committee decisions or accounts should be made available to members, and the Charity Commission (the regulator for registered charities in England and Wales) sets separate requirements for what must be filed with it. Check the hall's own governing document for what it requires to be published, and see how a governing document sets out digital responsibilities.

Where this sits alongside the rest of the website

None of this covers who owns the domain the council's or hall's website runs on, or what happens to that information when a clerk or secretary changes. Those are separate questions, covered on the guidance pages for handover and for members' data.

A council or hall that wants these pages built and kept current without relying on one volunteer's spare time can look at the Living Site, a maintained website service from the practice at webdesign.uk. It has a build price and a separate monthly price, and the monthly part can be cancelled at any time.

This page describes statutory publication requirements as a starting point and is not legal advice. A council or hall with an unusual structure, a joint committee, or a dispute about what counts as a meeting should take independent advice.