Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to take steps to reduce waiting times for autism assessments for children.

Children should not have to face long waits for an autism diagnosis and we are continuing to work with our partners to help localities address long waiting times for an autism diagnosis.

We have included autism indicators in the Mental Health Services Dataset, with data beginning to be collected from 1 April 2018. The data will include waiting times for an assessment for autism to begin. The current plan is to publish the dataset after a year of data has been collected.