New Autism Strategy (Autism Act 2009 Committee Report)

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest: I am a vice-president of the National Autistic Society, an honour I share with my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Browning. More than that, I thank the noble Baroness for her work in persuading the Liaison Committee to agree to set up this committee of inquiry in the first place. She and I started out working together on that, but when I was appointed leader of the British delegation to the Council of Europe, the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, did the heavy lifting alone and I thank her for that. I also thank the chair of the committee, and the committee itself, for coming forward with a report that is imaginative and shows us a way forward.

“Autistic young people can thrive in the right environment and collapse in the wrong one”.


Those were the words of Alan Milburn in his interim report Young People and Work. The report revealed that among young people who are not in employment, education or training, 22% cited autism as their main limiting condition. Milburn went on to say that benefits assessments

“lend themselves to a binary judgement”

of whether a person is able or unable to work, but this approach does not match the reality of many young people’s life-changing conditions. Autism is a life-changing condition. Seven out of every 10 autistic people want to be in work, but only three out of 10 are actually in work.

Like many, I want to see autistic people in a job, building up their confidence and giving them the opportunity to enjoy the quality of life that we all expect. The recommendations in this report offer us hope of progress, and I certainly hope—Hope with a big H—to see a more positive response from the Government than we have seen so far.

The Autism Act was a critical step forward in the recognition of autistic people, yet successive Governments have failed to deliver the change. With the greatest respect to my noble friend on the Front Bench and the noble Lord who will be responding for the Opposition, I can tell them that Dame Cheryl Gillan—who took the Autism Bill through Parliament and with whom I served on the Council of Europe, where we produced a major report on the problems that autistic people are facing across Europe—would certainly have plenty to say about the failures of Governments of all parties if she were with us today. She would be telling Ministers to take this report’s recommendations seriously and to engage with the charitable and voluntary sector to embrace the reforms it proposes.

My most immediate concern is the next autism strategy. It is the key to deciding priorities and making sure those priorities are delivered. The Act placed a strict legal duty on the Government to prepare and regularly review a national strategy to meet the needs of autistic people by improving local services. Is it not alarming to realise that after the first year of the 2021-26 strategy, there was no plan to deliver or fund it? That is a scandal. That strategy will end soon, and the Government say it will remain in place until a new strategy is agreed. Of that new strategy, the Government say that meaningful engagement will take place, but how long will that take? How long will we have to wait?

In response to the report, the Government praise the committee for the large amount of evidence it gathered. In view of that, I ask my noble friend to use that evidence, much of it given to the committee by autism charities and experts in caring and supporting people with autism and their families. Use it in working up the new strategy; I can tell her that it will save countless hours of research by her civil servants. The committee has done the work for you, so use the work that it has done.

The report points to a way we should all embrace and welcome. It calls for the new strategy to identify priority outcomes and produce a costed, deliverable plan to achieve those outcomes. The strategy should make clear who is responsible and accountable for delivery. To me that is common sense; having said that, I remember that when I was growing up, my mother would say to me, “Son, in life, sense is not that common”. Despite that, I plead with my noble friend to take the common-sense approach. Use the findings of this report to build on the new strategy, and do it right away.