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Council portal development

For clerks, chief officers and communications leads at parish, town and district councils who need meetings, minutes, notices, consultations, service information and facility hire to live on one accessible site built around how the council actually publishes.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

A town council with a clerk, a deputy and a part-time administrator publishes more than most people realise: an agenda for every full council and committee meeting, the minutes once approved, the notices of meetings, the annual return, the budget, the standing orders, the policies, the planning applications received from the district with the council's comment, and the consultations it is running on a play area, a neighbourhood plan or a change to the cemetery rules.

  • Today those land on a site built years ago by whoever volunteered: the clerk uploads a PDF, types a date into a page, and hopes the page is the one residents find.
  • Agendas are scanned from a signed copy, so a screen reader cannot read them; minutes from two years ago sit under a heading that says "latest".

Where it gets harder

Residents ring the office to ask when the hall is free, whether the allotment list is open, and who their ward councillor is.

  • The hall diary is a paper book in the caretaker's kitchen, so a hire enquiry waits until the caretaker is in.
  • The consultation on the play area ran as an email address, so the responses sit in an inbox and the clerk has to count them by hand before the committee meets.
  • When a resident asks for a document under a freedom of information request, the clerk searches three folders and the old site to find the version that was actually published, and cannot say with confidence on which date it went up.
  • The councillors meanwhile each want their profile, their committees and their declared interests shown correctly, and the communications officer wants to post a road closure alert without asking anyone for the password.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom council portal build normally covers:

  • A meetings module where each body From full council to a committee or working group, has its own calendar, agenda and minutes, with the agenda publication date, the meeting date and the minutes approval date recorded as separate fields and shown on the page
  • A councillor and committee register with profiles Membership, terms and a declarations of interest document per councillor
  • Notices and consultations With a structured response form per consultation, a closing date and an export of responses for the committee papers
  • Service pages written in plain language with opening hours Who to contact and a routing rule that sends each enquiry form to the right officer
  • A document library with categories such as policies Finance, planning comments and annual governance, each document carrying a published date and an accessibility status
  • Facility hire for halls Pitches and rooms with a public availability view, hire requests and a payment adapter where the council takes card payments
  • News and alerts that the communications officer can post from a phone

How discovery works

Discovery walks through a council year with the clerk: which bodies meet and how often, how an agenda is drafted, signed and published, how minutes move from draft to approved, which documents must be shown and for how long, how hire requests are handled and priced, and how consultations are reported back. Each becomes a named stage in the scope document: draft, publish, meet, approve, consult, hire, report.

Deliberately out of scope

  • The council's finance ledger and payroll, which stay in the accounting package
  • Planning decisions, which belong to the planning authority and are shown here only as a list with the council's comment
  • Legal advice on which documents the council must publish. The site records publication dates and holds an accessibility statement
  • It does not claim the council has met its publication or accessibility duties

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A district council with twelve committees, two hundred meetings a year, a public consultation programme and a facilities team hiring out eight venues with card payment is a different build from a parish council with one meeting a month and a village hall, and the scope document says so plainly.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from a walk-through of the council year, including the current site, the document folders and the hall diary
  • A written scope document naming each stage from agenda draft to consultation report and what is excluded
  • Design of the meetings page, a document record, a consultation form and the hire request on phone and desktop, checked against WCAG 2.2 AA as a design target
  • The build, deployed to your hosting or ours
  • Migration of past agendas, minutes and policies with their original publication dates, where relevant
  • Document templates for agendas and minutes that produce accessible HTML and PDF
  • Training for the clerk, the administrator, the communications officer and councillors who edit their own profile, with a short written guide
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your data

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access to the current site, the document folders, the hall diary and the list of bodies and councillors; the clerk and a communications contact named.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Discovery with the clerk, a committee chair and the communications officer; the publication cycle, consultation handling and the scope document are agreed with milestones.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Clickable designs of the meetings calendar, an agenda page, a consultation response form and the hire request, reviewed with a screen reader and at phone width.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in stages: documents and meetings first, then councillors, notices and consultations, then service pages, facility hire and payments.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The clerk publishes a real meeting cycle on the test site, runs a short consultation and takes a hire request through to payment, telling us where the steps differ from practice.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Date fields, document categories, routing rules and form wording are adjusted from the review and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Historic documents migrated with their dates, redirects from the old site in place, accessibility statement published, contact routing tested on addresses you control, checklist signed off.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The council publishes the next agenda on the new site; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Card payment providers for hall hire, allotment rents and cemetery fees via a payment adapter
  • Email providers and mailing-list services for meeting notifications and newsletters
  • Calendar feeds so councillors see meetings on their own devices
  • Mapping services for ward boundaries, facilities and notices tied to a location
  • Planning authority application lists supplied as a feed or a periodic file
  • Document conversion tools that produce accessible PDFs from agenda templates
  • Accounting packages receiving hire and allotment income as a periodic export
  • Webcast or recording platforms linked from the meeting record

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A town council with six committees and three hireable venues

The situation

A town council with a clerk, two staff and six committees published agendas as scanned PDFs on a site nobody could edit without the volunteer who built it, and took hall bookings in a paper diary.

Why it is a custom build

The reason this needs a custom build rather than a template site is the publication record: the council wanted every document to carry the date it was actually published and a status for its accessibility, so that a request for information could be answered from the site itself.

The scope we would propose

  • A meetings module where each body has its own schedule and the agenda, meeting and minutes dates are recorded separately
  • An agenda template that produces an accessible document from the clerk's draft
  • A councillor register with committee membership and a declarations document per member
  • A consultation module with a response form and a count that the clerk can export for the committee
  • Service pages with opening hours and routed contact forms
  • A hire module for the three venues with a public availability calendar, hire requests held for the caretaker to confirm and card payment through an adapter

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Number of meeting bodies and committees and how many documents a year they produce
  • Whether consultations use structured response forms and how responses are reported
  • Number of hireable facilities and whether card payments are taken through the site
  • Volume of historic agendas, minutes and policies to migrate with their dates
  • Document accessibility work: templates, conversion of key documents and the statement
  • Contact routing complexity and how many officers and teams receive enquiries
  • Councillor self-service for profiles and declarations
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Council portal package

Meetings, agendas and minutes with publication dates, councillor register, notices and consultations, plain-language service pages, facility hire and accessible documents for parish and town councils.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do you decide between a custom build and the package?

Discovery compares your publication cycle with what the council portal package does through configuration. A parish or town council with a handful of bodies, standard document categories and one or two venues usually fits the package. Many committees, a consultation programme with bespoke reporting, or integration with a planning feed and an accounting export point to custom work, and we say which before anything is quoted.

Will the site make us compliant with publication and accessibility rules?

No system can claim that. The portal records the date each document was published, holds an accessibility status per document and publishes your accessibility statement, and the design is checked against WCAG 2.2 AA as a target. Which documents the council must publish, and whether it has done so, remains for the clerk and the council to decide.

Can councillors edit their own pages?

Yes, within what the clerk allows. A councillor can update their profile, contact details and photograph, and upload their declarations document; committee membership and terms are set by the clerk so the register stays authoritative.

Can we take payment for hall hire and allotments?

Yes, through a card payment provider connected during setup. The portal records the hire or rent, the amount due and the payment reference; the money is handled by the provider and reconciled in your accounting package.

Who owns the site afterwards?

The council does. Source code and data, including every document and its publication date, are handed over at delivery. Hosting and maintenance are optional and separately agreed, and the site can move to another provider.

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