Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress NHS England has made on including an indicator in the Mental Health Services Data Set recording a diagnosis of autism; and when data collection of such diagnoses is planned to commence.

NHS England has been working with the Health and Social Care Information Centre to develop reporting from the new Mental Health Services Data Set. This mandatory data set includes provision for the diagnosis of autism to be recorded, and reporting on this data has been prioritised. We expect experimental data reports on the number of people diagnosed with autism to be published by the end of 2016.