Autism Employment Review

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. His grandson has a good champion in him, and I hope he can understand that. The noble Lord makes a really important point. The employment rate for people with autism was 31%. If you compare that with disabled people across the board at 55%, it is not good. That shows the extent of the problem. We recognise that this is extremely serious. Nothing in the way this Government are going about this is trying in any way to minimise the challenges faced by people with autism.

I take the noble Lord’s point: autism is not a disease, but it is a different way of learning and looking. That is true of many neurodivergent conditions, and there are things that can be learned. We have pulled together a panel with different kinds of expertise, not to create some generalised view on what it feels like to not think in the way that some other people think but to enable us to look at all the evidence and work with employers to try to make a better place for everybody to go out there and work. I hope the noble Lord will be reassured by that.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, will the Minister give us a further assurance that when the Government use the term “neurodivergence”, it is a broad spectrum, and you cannot help somebody with neurodivergence? You might be able to help somebody with dyslexia, autism or dyscalculia, for instance. I remind the House of my interests. There have to be specific help pathways for those conditions. If we start trying to be too general, we will end up helping no one.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for highlighting some of the conditions. It may reassure him to know that the academic panel we have pulled together is looking at a number of specific neurodivergent conditions. Those include ADHD, autism spectrum condition—with the acknowledgments made—dyslexia and dyscalculia. They also include DCD—developmental co-ordination disorder, also known as dyspraxia—and developmental language disorder, among other conditions. The noble Lord is absolutely right. The job of the panel is to review what is known and then to look at what can help. There will be some things, some steps employers could take, which may be of benefit to people with more than one condition, but there are some that will be quite specific, and we need to understand the evidence before we can make good recommendations.