Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to improve NHS timescales for diagnosing children with autism.

Diagnosing autism in children can involve a range of observations over time and a number of different professionals. The time taken to formulate a diagnosis will not be the same in all cases.

There are concerns in some local areas that the length of time some children have had to wait for an assessment for autism to begin is longer than the three months recommended by the National Institute for Care and Health Excellence (NICE) guidelines from a referral to a first appointment. Whilst local clinical commissioning groups have been working to bring down the waits in line with the NICE guidelines, to date there has been no national collection of waiting times data.

The Government is taking steps to rectify this and NHS Digital have confirmed they will be collecting and recording waiting times from referral for suspected autism to a first appointment within the Mental Health Services Data Set from April 2018. This will mean that each area can be held to account in real time and action can be taken to support them when waiting times are increasing.

An indicative timeline for the development of care pathways was set out in the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. The precise timetable for the establishment of a care pathway for autism will be confirmed by NHS England in due course.