Short answer

Strictly speaking, only the Clerk and the Chair must have role-based (non-personal) email addresses for Assertion 10 purposes. Other staff and councillors can use personal-looking addresses, though many councils use role-based emails (grounds@, facilities@, services@) more broadly because it makes handovers and notifications cleaner.

Detail

Assertion 10 of the Annual Governance and Accountability Return (AGAR) covers communications and the council's audit trail. The practical implication for software accounts is that the Clerk and Chair, as the council's officers of record, should not be receiving formal correspondence to a personal mailbox that disappears when they leave the role.

Beyond those two roles, councils have flexibility:

  • Many staff users in Civic.ly are on personal-looking addresses with no compliance issue.
  • Role-based addresses (townclerk@, clerk@, services@, grounds@, facilities@, environment@) are still recommended for any role where reminders and notifications need to survive a personnel change — PAT testing reminders, inspection schedules, supplier emails, and so on.
  • Where a council does want to migrate a user to a role-based address, the cleanest path is documented in How do I migrate a Civic.ly user to a new email address?.

Watch-outs

  • The Clerk and Chair are the firm line. If they're on a personal email when the auditor checks, expect a finding.
  • Don't push role-based emails on every user just for the sake of it — councils with very small teams sometimes don't have role-based IT and forcing it creates more friction than benefit.
  • Be careful with shared mailboxes: if services@ is registered to "Steve Hills" but it's actually a shared inbox the whole team uses, that's a data-integrity issue (the activity trail attributes everything to Steve). Better to assign the shared mailbox to a generic "name" or to refuse to use it as a single-user account.