Southwater Parish Council is now Cyber Essentials Certified

Let's start with what is Cyber Security? Cyber security refers to the measures taken to protect IT systems, networks, and data from criminal attack, unauthorised access, or accidental loss.

What is Cyber Essentials?

Cyber Essentials is a Government-backed certification scheme that helps keep your organisation’s and your customers’ data safe from cyber attacks.

Southwater Parish Council is proud to announce that our organisation is now Cyber Essentials Certified, marking a significant step forward in protecting our community, data, and operations. Cyber Essentials sets out a minimum technical standard to defend against the most common cyber-threats.

This certification confirms that SPC has implemented essential controls covering areas like firewalls, secure configuration, malware protection, management of user-access, and keeping software up to date.

It means we have self-assessed, had our measures independently verified, and committed to maintaining those standards through regular review and renewal.

Being Cyber Essentials Certified helps us meet increasing requirements from central government and the AGAR rules coming in 2026, including secure .gov.uk domain names and email addresses, areas which SPC is already compliant with.

SPC, as a Gold Award Council under the Local Council Award Scheme, already exceeds statutory requirements in governance, transparency, and community leadership. Our approach to cyber security should follow the same principle: to lead from the front, adopt good practice early, and set a standard for others to follow.

We will continue to review and improve our protections, keeping cyber security as a regular part of our risk management and decision-making, so that our community can rely on us to be resilient now and in the future.