Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of the number of staff available to conduct autism assessments for (a) children and (b) adults (i) nationally and (ii) in York.

The National Framework for autism assessment services, published by NHS England in April 2023, recognises the need to increase the supply of specialist workforce for autism assessment services.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan sets out the steps the National Health Service and its partners need to take to deliver an NHS workforce; this is backed by over £2.4 billion over the next five years to fund additional education and training places. We aim to increase training places by 26% for both clinical psychology and child and adolescent psychotherapy by 2031, taking the combined number of training places to over 1,300. Training places will be more than 1,000 each year up to 2028/29.

In addition to education and training for clinical psychologists and child and adolescent psychotherapists, over the next three years, NHS England has committed funding of over £600 million to grow the wider psychological professions workforce through training approximately 15,000 more individuals to undertake psychological therapist and psychological practitioner roles.