Autism Act 2009

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for raising this subject. I also thank the Minister for taking this on. One feels that something as difficult as being the lead department on this issue should fall on the shoulders of someone who has not been quite so heavily worked over the past few weeks—but I am afraid that that is the way these things fall.

Every time I have spoken about autism, I use a quote about it being a three-dimensional spectrum; that is, it crosses in all ways. When you know about autism, you generally know about one autistic person and then you meet another autistic person. This is true of most hidden disabilities, but is probably more true of autism than any other.

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[Lord Addington]

My Lords, to continue with the speech that I was making, a quote I often use about autism is that it is a three-dimensional spectrum. I am now going to fulfil a promise I made in September last year, when a councillor, Claire Young, gave me that quotation in a meeting run by the National Autistic Society at the Liberal Democrat conference. I know the words; I do not really understand, certainly not as well as others in this debate, exactly what they mean. I have a perception, because I have some experience of those who have worked with autism and of speaking to those who have it, but I will never know as well as they do exactly what autism means: the idea that it is difficult to assess, deal with and help.

Having got a legal responsibility to follow a coherent strategy led by one department, it is important that the others all join in with it. I have a briefing that suggests that although people at Jobcentre Plus have read the relevant leaflet, young people with autism are reporting back that they still have problems accessing the service. This is pretty typical of anybody who deals with a disability of any description: “I have read the leaflet, I know what is in it, and I know what is going to happen”. They are not trained well enough to be flexible and to understand that there is a spectrum of needs, and you must go from one level to another. This is not unusual to autism; it is just that autism may present a set of problems that are very difficult to access, possibly because the person with high-functioning autism may have difficulty explaining their situation, as been put to me by many people. If this is true, you must make sure that the person who is providing the service is properly trained. A leaflet is not good enough.

I have dealt with this before. In the Welfare Reform Bill, we finally got from my noble friend Lord Freud something that I had been after for about 12 years, that is, that the person who makes an assessment must be trained in the disability that they are assessing. This correlates to the Act that we are talking about today. It is part of the continuum. Let us not forget that the Autism Act would not have been necessary if all the other pieces of legislation that merely referred to disability had provided these solutions. When we looked at the online copy of the guidance, 10 Ministers in the previous Government, representing at least half-a-dozen departments, had all signed up to it. That was an admission, shall we say, from the Treasury Bench— I think that that is a good and fair way of putting it, and I do not think it was disagreed with by anybody—that you must co-ordinate.

Autism presents unusual and unique problems. It is not the only set of original and unique problems. That is why I said that I did not envy the Minister his task. He and his department may well be lumbered with breaking the ground for more efficient support for all disability sectors, because this is clearly the way that it should have happened in the first place.

I have also been encouraged to talk about the SEN Green Paper. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, has mentioned education. Another truism of mine is that if you are a disabled person, choose your parents well and you will get the best out of the system. As I have said before, I still do not think there is a better combination than a lawyer and a journalist. They are the people who will point out that you are breaking the law and then let the world know about it. Too often it requires that degree of pressing and attacking to get people to move. If this legislation works, they will no longer be necessary. You will not be dumped at the end of one process, waiting to be picked up again by another. That continuation is vital. Not only is it important to receive some form of support at school, but also to be handed over to the college or university sector. As I have bored the House before with my findings on the discrepancy between the apprenticeship system and the university system in the way that some disabled groups, with exactly the same people potentially, are dealt with, I will not go into it again here. That type of disagreement and lack of continuity or progress is frequent, sometimes within the same department.

Will the Minister give us an idea of how the Government are monitoring this and of the type of problems they are addressing? This would be very helpful because we are going through a cultural shift and if there are no problems, it means they have not been looked for. They will be there: everybody here knows that the best way to find that one does not have a problem is not to look for it. If the Minister can tell us how the Government are identifying these problems and what they are doing to look for them, I will be much happier about this. It is not the Autism Act’s implementation; implementation across the board and the establishment of good practice for other groups are vital here. I wish my noble friend well in answering this, but it is not easy.