Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate she has made of the average length time (a) children and (b) adults wait for an autism assessment (i) nationally and (ii) in York.

The data requested is not held centrally. However, some relevant information can be drawn from the Mental Health Services Data Set.

Whilst data is not available at a constituency level, it is available at the integrated care system (ICS) level. According to the latest Autism Waiting Time Statistics in June 2023, nationally 6% of adults, whose referrals have been open for at least 13 weeks, received their first contact appointment within 13 weeks. In Humber and North Yorkshire, this was higher at 11%.

Nationally, in June 2023, for children aged between 0 to 17 years old, 7% had their first appointment within 13 weeks compared to 3% in Humber and North Yorkshire. Data on children and young people in this dataset is expected to be an underestimate. Caution should be used when interpreting these statistics since they are experimental rather than official statistics.