New Autism Strategy (Autism Act 2009 Committee Report)

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Rock, on the truly impressive way in which she chaired our committee and got this group of very knowledgeable people to produce a really tight and very good report. I also add my congratulations to Stuart Stoner and his team and to Professor Laura Crane. We had the wonderful opportunity to meet so many witnesses and organisations as part of this; I learned a lot during this process.

The central issue is about this new strategy. We really have to press government that, this time, it must have a good implementation plan. It was spelled out in the recommendation that detail matters; we are looking for a plan about what, who, when and how, as well as the resourcing and better accountability. There is nothing in the response that says that. In trying to think of a suitable word for the response to the first recommendation, I got as far as “bland”—it did not really say anything, as far as I could see, of any substance. That implementation plan and strategy are vital. Will there be an implementation plan with the strategy? Will it address all these features in the committee’s recommendation about what, who, when, how and resourcing?

Much has already been said about some of the detail, which I will not repeat. I just want to make two big points, the first of which is the human one. Throughout this, I was very struck by the pain and the love, and the private anxieties we heard about, as well as the difficulties of trying to understand and navigate the system and search for solutions, and the emotional toll on individuals and families. I was very impressed by the visit we made under the leadership of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope to the Phoenix School, which is a specialist school. There we met parents who suddenly, having come away from a position of bewilderment, were then seeing possibilities in this safe haven for what their children could be. Obviously, that is very relevant to the wider debate about specialist schools and the support for autistic people and their families.

From that visit, I also commend one thing we noticed: the Phoenix School provided an outreach service to other schools, and indeed ran classrooms in some other schools. That model is something the Government should well look at as part of their looking at specialist schools, because it looked as if it was working—although we obviously did not see it.

The other thing that came out of that visit was the importance of communications, technology and speech therapists, whom I have to confess I had not really thought about in quite this detail before. One father there, in a really emotional moment, talked about how he found out how he could communicate with his child, and his child could communicate with him. That, to me, was very impressive.

That is one big point—the human bit that we must not lose—and the second bit is about the system and the culture, a lot of which is, frankly, incoherent. Members of the committee will remember one of our witnesses saying that too often it is

“the state fighting the state”.

One set of policies does not match the other, or they are going in opposite directions, and that is a serious issue. Another issue here is the danger that we will just produce another set of rules, sent out by the centre, which people will have to train on but which are not really owned, as people are just paying lip service to them.

There are examples in other areas where people, despite having appropriate adjustments and their notes and passports written up and so on, were just ignored—with fatal consequences in the case I am thinking of. I know that in Parliament we can rely only on the tools we have of legislation, regulations and guidance—trying to get people to do what we want, if you like—but that is why accountability is so vital and why it runs through this like a thread. But it is not just about accountability: we will know we have succeeded when it is not just accountability hanging over people’s head but a feeling of responsibility. People must feel responsible to do something about the people in front of them.

My question to the Minister is an impossible one: how will the Government address the incoherence in policy and these cultural issues when taking this forward? I am conscious—I have finished my time—that I am in danger of widening this out too far, but let me just leave these points: strategy and implementation, and making sure it is owned. Both parts are vital.