Most parish councillors, when they join, give the clerk the email address they already have. It works, for a while. Then a resident makes a freedom of information request, or a councillor leaves with three years of planning correspondence in their Gmail, or a phishing email arrives looking like it came from the chair, and the council finds out why the guidance says what it says.
The two problems
Data protection. The council is the data controller for personal information in council correspondence: residents’ names, addresses, complaints, planning objections. Under UK GDPR it has to be able to say where that information is, keep it secure, and delete it when it should. It can do none of those things for a personal account it doesn’t control. The Information Commissioner’s Office has said as much, and the National Association of Local Councils’ guidance has for years recommended a council address for every councillor.
Freedom of information. Information about council business is held by the council for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act even when it’s in a councillor’s private inbox. A request has to be answered within 20 working days. With council addresses the clerk can search; with personal ones the clerk is asking nine people to search their own inboxes and trusting the result.
There is a third, practical problem. Shared family email accounts, autocomplete sending a confidential paper to the wrong “Dave”, and councillors who use their work address and then change jobs. Each one has happened to a council somewhere this year.
What good practice looks like
- Every councillor has an address on the council’s own domain, ideally the .gov.uk one: firstname.surname@brookford-pc.gov.uk. The clerk has one too, plus a generic clerk@ address that survives changes of clerk.
- Councillors use it for everything to do with the council, and nothing else. The council’s standing orders or an email policy say so.
- The clerk, or the council’s IT supplier, can create, suspend and close mailboxes. When a councillor leaves, the mailbox is closed, its contents retained for a set period in case of a request, then deleted.
- Two-factor authentication is switched on. It is the single cheapest security measure available and most providers include it.
- The addresses are published on the website, so residents can write to their councillor directly.
What it costs
Councils generally reject Microsoft 365 for councillors on cost (a licence each, every month) and buy plain mailboxes from a provider that charges per mailbox per year, typically £20 to £25 plus VAT, sometimes with a one-off setup charge. For a council of nine councillors and a clerk that’s £200 to £250 a year, which is less than most councils spend on the Christmas tree. Some website suppliers include a number of mailboxes in their fee; check what happens when you need the eleventh.
The May changeover
Every May, after the annual meeting and in election years after the count, the list changes. New councillors need an address before their first meeting papers go out. Departing councillors need theirs closed, after they’ve been reminded to forward anything the council should keep. The clerk needs a short written routine for this, because it happens when everything else is happening too. The neat version is a website admin where adding a councillor to the list creates the mailbox and removing them schedules its closure, which is what we’re building towards; the plain version is a checklist and an afternoon.
Getting councillors to use it
The objection is always the same: “I don’t want another inbox.” The answer is that they don’t have to open it: most providers let a council mailbox be added to the phone’s existing mail app alongside the personal one, so there is one inbox with two addresses, and replies go from the right one. Setting that up is a ten-minute job per councillor and the clerk shouldn’t be the one doing it; the provider’s instructions, or a councillor who’s done it, are the right route. What the council should decide, and minute, is that from a given date council business goes through council addresses. After that it’s a habit, and habits take a couple of months.