New Autism Strategy (Autism Act 2009 Committee Report)

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap. I was not a member of the committee but I did give evidence to it, both professionally and as next of kin for two autistic family members. I want to highlight four points relevant to the debate.

First, too many autistic people are still being detained in mental health settings without a mental disorder. Although the new Mental Health Act intends to prevent admissions of autistic people without concurrent mental illness, this provision will not be enacted until there are sufficient community services in place. The Minister knows of my deep concern that without a costed plan, this promise is rather misleading.

The trouble is that, time and again, crisis-driven care is failing people and costing lives, quite apart from being financially very costly. In my government-commissioned report, My Heart Breaks, published in 2023, I reviewed the care of autistic people and people with learning disabilities who were being detained under the Act in long-term segregation. I found no therapeutic benefit at all to this enforced isolation and warned that it causes lasting psychological harm, worsens trauma, damages relationships and can lead to a form of social death.

I am looking forward to the forthcoming annual report from the Care Quality Commission, which now manages the independent care, education and treatment review programme, and to learning about its successes in discharging people, but of course the difficulty is that as people are discharged, new people are still being admitted. In my committee we were unable to identify how many people died unexpectedly during admission, but we know that autistic people, and especially autistic women, are at a higher risk of suicide than non-autistic people. Substantial numbers think about suicide during their lifetime, and up to a third actually plan or attempt suicide.

Many autistic women end up with inappropriate diagnoses, such as personality disorder, that stay with them and delay or prevent access to much-needed care and support. We know that people are being failed long before hospital admission, and we need early trauma-informed community support to prevent crisis-driven care.

This brings me to my third point. No anticipatory care planning is required under the Care Act, despite an obvious risk when there is care breakdown, most notably parental carer death. Does the Minister agree that an effective and simple change to the Care Act would be to require an anticipatory care plan for all family carers of autistic people, perhaps carers over the age of 70? The Minister will be aware of the tragic death of David Lodge beside his elderly father who had died suddenly at home. Ensuring that anticipatory care needs are regularly discussed and reviewed would prevent many inappropriate hospital admissions for autistic people.

I want to end my remarks by reflecting on the gap in life expectancy for autistic people highlighted every year by LeDeR’s Learning from Lives and Deaths: People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People, with death occurring six to 15 years earlier. Currently, not all the LeDeR recommendations are actually implemented, and I ask the Minister to confirm unequivocally that the LeDeR programme will be both strengthened and made mandatory. The Government’s response to Time to Deliver said:

“The government remains committed to reviewing every death of a person with a learning disability or an autistic person that is notified to LeDeR and ensuring that learning from these reviews is shared”.


Is that commitment still true?