Hi everyone, I officially submitted the petition and your comments to Thurrock Council in December last year. The Democratic Services department validated the petition (no .485) and passed it to the relevant people - Rory Patterson, Ann Osola and Cllr. J. Halden. They were required (in accordance with Procedure Rule 10.6) to arrange for me to be informed in writing as to what action, if any, the Authority has taken, or is taking, in respect of the petition by 21st January 2017. That deadline has now passed and I have not received a response. In addition to this, I have been in contact via e-mail with the Children's Commissioning department. I asked them to ensure that your (lovely) comments were taken into consideration as part of their consultation on Children's Services - they are refusing to do so. You can read their reply here - "I understand your disappointment with our refusal to accept the comments, but in order to ensure our consultations are robust and fair, we set out a consultation plan containing the start and end dates, consultation platforms (i.e. the council portal for electronic submissions), scheduled events, contact details etc. We publicised this plan adequately and I can see that you received the plan as it was attached to your email dated 7 December 2017. The email requested wide feedback, but we also asked that the Thurrock Council consultation be promoted through “as many channels as possible”. We wanted to provide residents with varied forms of access to our consultation. However, as much as we encourage feedback the process for monitoring the submission of entries, comments and questions must be clearly identified and closely managed. There is a vast range of platforms available to residents to air their views regarding Council proposals and decisions, but unless we are made aware of such a platform we cannot acknowledge it and if we had not acknowledged the platform we cannot include any output from it. I am afraid that on this occasion we will not be including the comments within the change.org petition regarding the 0-19 consultation because we have no evidence that the comments were part of a complete document submitted to the responsible officers within the designated time frame; 25 October 2016 to 4 December 2016." When I set up the petition on Change.org, I listed the e-mail address of a contact within the consultation team, who would be sent automated updates on the petitions progress. These updates would have been received before the end of the consultation period, but unfortunately I have no way of proving that they were sent.