PSBAR Accessibility Statement SaaS — UK Public Sector
The Accessibility Statement That Maintains Itself
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A narrow SaaS that drafts, hosts and continuously keeps fresh the legally-required accessibility statements for UK public sector websites — the exact artefact the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) inspect under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR). It ties a scheduled WCAG 2.2 AA scan to an auto-generated statement page (plain-English summary + live list of known issues + last-reviewed date that updates itself), hosted on a `*.yourcouncil.gov.uk/accessibility` path via CNAME. The addressable market is ~30,000 UK public bodies — 382 principal councils, 202 NHS trusts, ~300 higher education institutions, ~9,000 parish and town councils, plus arms-length bodies. The December 2024 GDS monitoring report found that of 1,203 sites monitored, many statements were out of date despite a legal annual-review requirement; EHRC has issued 93 formal letters since 2022. Incumbent scanners (Silktide, AccessiBe, UserWay) monitor but do not own the statement artefact. That’s the wedge.
The Story
Meet the user
Diane is the digital communications lead at a mid-sized district council in the East Midlands. She inherited the job two years ago from a colleague who’d cobbled the council website together on a tight budget. Then in early 2025 an email lands from GDS: the council’s website has been selected for PSBAR monitoring. She opens the accessibility statement page for the first time in eighteen months. The “last reviewed” date reads March 2023. The “known issues” list mentions a PDF library that was retired nine months ago. The contact email bounces because the digital officer it names has moved on.
She has twelve weeks to fix the issues, update the statement, and produce a disproportionate-burden assessment for the PDFs — and her total comms team is her, half of Alan (who mostly does the newsletter) and a work experience placement. She spends a weekend on the gov.uk model template, three evenings trying to reproduce what the old dev team did, and still doesn’t know whether what she’s written will pass.
Then her counterpart at a neighbouring council sends her a link to StatementGuard — she pastes in the website URL, ticks the CMS she uses, and within twenty minutes has a fully compliant accessibility statement hosted at her own domain, wired to a weekly axe-core scan that updates the “known issues” list and the “last reviewed” date automatically. Every quarter it nudges her to confirm the contact email and the disproportionate-burden PDFs. EHRC call her council the following spring: the statement passes without query.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.6/10
~30,000 UK public bodies legally obliged to publish + annually review a statement; a ~£100M+ UK TAM at £30-£150/mo; no incumbent focuses on the statement artefact itself.
Dec 2024 GDS report flagged stale statements as a primary failure mode; 29,787 WCAG issues across 1,203 monitored sites; 41% of local govt leaders cite staff time as the biggest barrier; 93 EHRC formal letters since 2022.
axe-core + Pa11y are open-source and battle-tested; GOV.UK model statement is a structured template; scan-to-prose LLM generation is straightforward; standard Next.js + Supabase build.
First GDS three-yearly monitoring report published Dec 2024 — findings are fresh, non-compliance list is now public, EHRC is actively issuing letters, WCAG 2.2 AA became the standard in Oct 2023.
PSBAR is structural UK law; annual-review requirement is evergreen; accessibility regulation only ever tightens (WCAG 2.2 → 3.0 pipeline); statement page is a permanent website artefact once embedded.
Solo-buildable but non-trivial: crawler infra, scheduled jobs, hosted statement pages with custom domains, CMS connectors, CSV import for manual issues, annual-review workflow.
Strongest
Durability
PSBAR is not going anywhere, the annual review requirement creates a recurring need, and the statement page is a permanent fixture of every public sector website. You’re selling a durable, recurring-revenue compliance artefact, not a one-off audit.
Watch out
Execution Difficulty
Selling to public sector means G-Cloud listing for the bigger councils/NHS trusts, crown commercial framework vetting for real enterprise work, and slow procurement cycles. Self-serve at the lower end (parish councils, small arms-length bodies, single universities’ faculty sites) is the way in.
Pain Point
The problem
“Many accessibility statements are now out of date and have not been reviewed in the last 12 months, which may mean users are more likely to encounter problems with the website or app.”
— GDS Accessibility Monitoring Report, Dec 2024
The pain operates at three levels — each of which current tools fail to address. First, the statement itself is what gets audited, but nobody builds for it. GDS’s monitoring process is explicit: they look for a statement, check it meets the legally required format, list all known issues, and show a review within the last 12 months. Of 1,203 sites audited between Jan 2022 and Sept 2024, 15% had no statement at first audit. The harder failure mode — statements that exist but are stale — is widespread and structurally hard to fix. Silktide, AccessiBe and UserWay scan pages. They email reports. They don’t host, version or auto-update the statement page that the auditor actually opens.
Second, the review cadence is impossible with staff time reality. PSBAR requires the statement to be reviewed at least annually and updated whenever a significant change is made to the site or a new issue is found. For a typical district council with a 100-page site that changes weekly, that means dozens of micro-updates per year. No comms lead has the time. A statement that auto-updates its “known issues” list from a weekly scan and its “last reviewed” timestamp from that same trigger removes the maintenance entirely.
Third, enforcement is now real and publishable. Since Jan 2022, EHRC has sent 93 initial letters to non-compliant bodies; 66 complied without needing formal enforcement action. Crucially, GDS will publish — on behalf of the Minister for the Cabinet Office — a public list of bodies with non-compliant statements. For a council or NHS trust, appearing on that list is reputational damage no elected official wants. That raises willingness to pay for a “statement stays compliant, automatically” promise.
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