Beacon
A parish council website that keeps itself up to date.
Meetings, minutes, decisions and spending, kept by the clerk. Flood warnings, roadworks, river levels, bus stops and council tax context, pulled from official sources automatically — so the site is useful between meetings, not just after them.
What the clerk does, and what the site does
| The clerk enters | The site finds on its own |
|---|---|
| Meetings, agendas and minutes | Flood warnings — Environment Agency |
| Decisions and the budget | River levels at named gauges |
| Payments over £100 | Roadworks — DfT Street Manager, with a map |
| Councillors and interests | Neighbourhood policing — data.police.uk |
| Planning applications | Urgent treatment centre waiting times |
| The local directory | Bus stops, live departures and train times |
| Newsletters — by email, if you like | Council tax context — what the precept is a share of |
Things it deliberately does not do
It does not track your residents. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party fonts, no map tiles. The maps are drawn on the server from OpenStreetMap data. You are invited to open developer tools and check that nothing on the page contacts anywhere else — a promise worth making because it can be verified.
It does not pretend a failed check is good news. If the Environment Agency cannot be reached, the page says "flood warnings could not be checked" and tells the reader to go to the official service. It does not quietly show yesterday's all-clear. The same rule applies everywhere: a silence is never rendered as an all-clear.
It does not claim to know a bus is coming. Where live departures are available they are marked as live; where they are not, the page says which stops serve the village and links to the operator. Sending somebody to stand at a rural stop for a bus that was never running is worse than telling them to check.
Accessibility and the law
Parish council websites are covered by the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. Beacon is built to meet them: it works without JavaScript, has a text-size control and a dark mode, uses real headings and labels, and every image a clerk uploads requires a description before it can be published — the software will not let that step be skipped.
Publication scheme, complaints procedure, privacy notice and accessibility statement pages are built in, because you have to have them.
What it costs
£15 a month, including hosting
One price. Hosting, the domain pointed at it, updates, and the person who wrote it answering your email. No setup fee, no tiers, no per-councillor pricing, no annual lock-in.
No council has adopted Beacon yet. The demonstration site is a real, complete install for a fictional council — every councillor, payment, meeting and minute on it is invented, and it says so on every page.
So the first council to use it would be the first, with everything that means: direct access to the developer, and the ordinary risk of being first. Both are real. If you would rather wait until somebody else has gone first, that is a reasonable thing to do and we will still be here.
Getting in touch
Email hello@truecorehosting.com. Tell us the council and roughly what you have now — a website you cannot edit, a Facebook page, or nothing at all are all common starting points.