Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress the Government has made on implementation of the recommendations of the working group on autism on the time taken to diagnose autism.

There is no formal working group currently looking specifically at the time taken for an autism diagnosis to be made. Information on current waiting times for an autism assessment is drawn from the Public Health England report of the 2016 Self-Assessment Framework exercise.

The Department continues to work with its partners to address long waiting times for an autism diagnosis. This includes work to ensure the inclusion of autism diagnosis and outcomes indicators in the Mental Health Services Dataset, with new robust data collected from 1 April 2018. This will bring more transparency and help to drive up performance on waiting times.