BREAKING NEWS

***Update***

This morning (Monday, 31st July, 9.05am), we have heard from the leader of KCC’s (Paul Carter’s) secretary. He is currently on leave and will answer questions on his return.

We have asked for our enquiries to be passed to someone else who *is* available and for Mr Carter’s return date.

We have also asked for clarity on the removal of the ability to email consultation responses and what that means for any responses that have already been emailed to the consultation address.

Well, everyone – we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that Kent County Council have obviously noticed our campaign and are concerned by it.

Someone at Kent County Council has obviously been in receipt of too many emails. Because they now say they aren’t accepting email responses.

They want to frustrate the consultation process and deny people from having their own voice by making the consultation process difficult.

Many who have responded to the consultation already say that the consultation has leading questions, is confusing and is putting words in their mouth. There’s also a word count that stops people getting across what they want to say and you must register on the site, making it a long, overly-complex and frustrating process.

This sends a clear message that Kent County Council really *doesn’t* want to hear your views. They want to discount what you have said if you have emailed. They want to make things difficult and won’t listen unless you fill in their difficult and leading questionnaire so they can group the opinions together and make up some useless stats. Group responses and count them as fewer than they are.

DESPITE both Paul Carter, Leader of Kent County Council and Andrew Scott-Clarke, Director of Public Health both saying they wanted everyone to respond to the consultations when they were interviewed by the BBC on Friday.

Here are the screen shots – the first showing the site when the consultation was published on the site on the 19th of July

And the second, screenshot today, 29th July.

Anyone can view the page as it was by clicking here.

Google automatically caches versions of pages so that you can see how they were before changes are made.

In response to this change, we have submitted a Freedom of Information request, which Kent County Council must legally respond promptly to. The latest they may respond to the request is by the 29th of August, 5 days before the end of the consultation.

We have also emailed Paul Carter, Kent County Council leader.

We will now work on updating this website’s consultation page.