A new website is on the cards for a parish council after the existing five-year-old site was declared "not fit for purpose".

Locum clerk to St Cuthbert Out Parish Council John Furze revealed that the parish could easily afford the new site as the council has underspent its annual budget to the tune of £15,000.

Mr Furze, who is standing in for clerk Angela Pearce who is on sick leave, presented a motion asking for the new easy-access site last week.

Mr Furze proposed that the parish council spend £750 on a new off-the-shelf site from an Exeter-based web design company.

Mr Furze said: "Your website isn't really fit for purpose.

"There are much better websites available that will allow you to engage with the public more effectively.

"There is no reason that a new site should not have pages for other organisations and residents associations."

Mr Furze said that the council could decide who had permission to edit the site and that advances to web technology meant that uploading documents to a new site would be a simple process.

"Anyone who can find a document on a computer should be able to do it," he said.

But few of the councillors were keen on his proposal to award the contract for the site to the Exeter company Vision ICT without approaching other suppliers. They asked for other options to be considered including asking the builders of the Wells City Council website, locally-based Phase 2 if they would like to tender for the work.

Mr Furze believed that a new site from Vision ICT could be up and running within a matter of weeks but councillors decided that three quotes should be obtained before a contract was awarded.

A motion for delegated permission to the clerk and the council's chair of finance to collect quotes and agree a deal was defeated and the council agreed to look at all three quotes at the next full meeting in March before agreeing a contract.