Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to implement the recommendations in the report entitled, A spectrum of obstacles, published by the Westminster Commission on Autism in July 2016.

We are committed to ensuring that autistic people have equitable access to services, recognising the health inequalities they currently experience.

We are reviewing our autism strategy to ensure it remains fit for purpose and we are extending it to include children.

To inform our review we launched a national call for evidence, which closed on 16 May. This will help us understand what is working and where we need to push harder to transform the experiences of autistic people. We received over 2,700 responses and will be publishing the revised strategy later this year.

We also launched a consultation on proposals to introduce mandatory awareness training for learning disability and autism to ensure health and care staff have the knowledge and skills to deliver safe, compassionate and informed care. This closed on 26 April and we received around 5,000 responses which we are now considering. We will publish our response to the consultation shortly.