SEND Provision and Reform

Lincoln Jopp Excerpts

Monday 13th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing this debate. We have heard varying views on the question of demand, with some people saying that it has not gone up at all and that others saying it has. I have relied on the House of Commons Library to tell me that since 2015 demand for EHCPs has ballooned by 140% and that in 2025 there were 13 times more people waiting for an autism assessment than there were in 2019.

Hon. Members across the House have described very effectively the extraordinary diagnosis of a system that has been unable to meet demand, so I will not replay the tape. The 98% tribunal success rate is symptomatic of that, and it is pretty shocking. It shows that the system is having to be fought against systemically, which is deeply worrying. Members across the House have replayed case studies from their own inboxes, but I do not have time to go into the cases of child Y, child L, child F, child D and the many others, all of whom have finally come to their Member of Parliament because they could see no way through and because the computer had said no. It has come to that, for them, but that should not be the case.

In the time remaining, I want to take a strategic approach and look upstream. In March last year, the Secretary of State for Health said that he was sold on the idea that overdiagnosis was at the root cause of mental health illness. On 1 June, I asked the Secretary of State for Education whether any work was being done between her Department and the Health Department on what was causing the increased demand on the special educational needs system. She said that she was very concerned indeed about that. I then waited until 1 December before asking what she and the Health Secretary had done in the intervening seven months. I think it was the Minister for School Standards who kindly said that she was very concerned about it. Five days later, the Health Secretary announced that there was going to be a six-month study into the causes of the increase in demand on the special educational needs system, and that it would report in the summer. I do not think anyone is covering themselves in glory here. As a nation, we need to increase our understanding of this phenomenon that we are experiencing—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I call Jen Craft.