A local business has contacted the Parish Council regarding an email they received titled ‘Renew your listing in the Millbrook Parish Business Directory’.

Please note the email is from an organisation called Parish.uk and has NO affiliation with Millbrook Parish Council.

• The operators set up a website called anyplace.parish.uk/business-directory for every town and village in the UK. They’re entitled to do this.
• They populate every location with the publicly-available information of businesses operating in that location (again nothing wrong with that although it is unsolicited)
• They then contact you to offer you to renew or update your listing at a price (from what I can see from going most of the way through their process for my own business, it’s about £20 a year)

Information copied from the Society of Local Clerk’s website  (posted 14th May 2025)

SLCC is aware that some clerks and their councils may have been confused or concerned about emails received by them from Parish UK, which is the trading name of Parish Services Ltd, a company based in Portsmouth. The Parish UK website is built around publicly available data drawn from sources including the Office for National Statistics and Wikipedia. Under each ‘parish’ is a business listing, which reflects information in the public domain. Emails from Parish UK have sought payment to maintain this business listing.

The individual ‘parish’ sites also include information relating to the council, education, business, planning, property, heritage and farming. Some recipients of these emails, including parish councils and businesses based in parishes, have been concerned about any association which may be inferred with the parish council.

Parish Services Ltd have previously stated of their website:

The PARISH.UK Network is not a scam. It is a Community Action Initiative (not run by Parish Councils) which includes a low cost online business directory for each UK Parish that local businesses can choose to be included within should they wish. The pages receive high local visitor traffic, due to the unique data presented for each Parish. The listings for business do exist in the business directory pages already, so we simply ask a business if they wish to keep their listing. There is no obligation to do so and a business can choose to either renew or cancel or let the listing expire naturally.

For more information have a look at the reviews on Trustpilot .  (113 reviews as 29th January 2026 3 star or below with 95% giving 1 star.   Despite no having subscribed businesses are approached to renew their listings.

If you have a concern about any email you receive, from any source, which you may consider to be fraudulent or an attempt at ‘passing off’, you can report those concerns to Action Fraud. Action Fraud is the UK’s national reporting centre for cyber-crime where you should report fraud if you have been scammed, defrauded or experienced cyber-crime.