Campaign

In 2009, the National Autistic Society led a campaign to create the Autism Act in England. This guaranteed the rights of autistic adults in England. It is England’s only law aimed at improving support for people with one particular disability. 

The Autism Act states there has to be a Government strategy for improving services for autistic adults, and each local authority must have one too. This strategy should be updated every five years. 

Ten years after the Autism Act became law, we looked at how much has changed since then. We believed there was not enough progress and still not enough support for autistic adults. Our report 'Autism Act: 10 Years On' showed that more than 2 in 3 autistic adults were not getting the support they needed to do everyday things like going out and about, cooking dinner or managing their money. 

When the autism strategy was about to be updated in 2019, we campaigned for it to include autistic children too. We also campaigned for the Government to:

• Create specialist autism support in every council in England and to give councils the money they urgently need to fix the crisis in social care. Specialist autism teams offer support across diagnosis, mental health and social care so autistic people can get the tailored support they may need. 
• Hold local areas accountable for their diagnosis waiting times and create a new waiting time standard. 
• Review the Mental Health Act so that autism is no longer defined as a ‘mental disorder’. 
• Fund a long-term autism understanding campaign across the UK, so that we can improve millions of people’s attitudes towards autistic people.

Result 

The autism strategy was delayed until 2021, due to the general election and the pandemic. When it was released, the main commitments were to:

• Invest £10.5 million into finding new ways to reduce diagnosis waiting times for children and young people  
• Invest £2.5 million into improving the quality of adult diagnostic and post-diagnostic pathways and diagnosis waiting times 
• Increase public understanding of autism with a long-term, nationwide initiative.  
• Providing £18.5 million to prevent autistic people from falling into mental health crisis and £21 million to local authorities to help people in mental health hospitals back into the community.  
• Improving understanding by training education professionals, job centre staff and frontline staff in the justice system.

There were many other commitments, which totalled almost £75 million and represented the biggest investment in England’s autistic people ever.  

However, the strategy only accounted for one year, until 2022. So far, the Government has given no concrete dates for when future plans will be released. Instead, the Government has said they are prioritising updating the Autism Act statutory guidance, which sets out what schools, local authorities and health services must do to comply with the law.