Autism and Neurodiversity Research Funding

Nickie Aiken Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee. It was encouraging to see that the revenue settlement for the Ministry of Justice over the next three years was a pretty good one, with a just over 4% increase year on year. Obviously, it is now going to be for Ministers, in their allocation process, to work out precisely what they want to spend within that envelope. I very much hope that the announcements we made as a result of the call for evidence—published as part of the autism strategy document in late July, which I cleared together with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health—will be followed through on.

More than that, it became increasingly clear to me, as I read the response to the call for evidence and as I followed the debate, that screening people coming into the criminal justice system and the prison system is an essential prerequisite of understanding the best way to handle them. I think a screening process for brain condition would reveal acquired brain injuries. It might reveal an undiagnosed condition—maybe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, attention deficit disorder, dyslexia even. Let us do that at this stage and work out what is going on in people’s minds, so that we can not just better manage them, but actually help them along the path of rehabilitation.

Do you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that my worry is that, time and again—not just in the prison system, but in the probation service—regimes are set up and orders are made with the best of intentions, and the people with these conditions are set up to fail, because they are not able actually to access, understand or compute that in a way that perhaps neurotypical people can? That is not their fault; it is a fact of who they are and what they are. That is why we need to change the approach that we take. I do not want to see people set up to fail. I certainly do not want excuses for criminal behaviour, but I do want smart answers on ways in which we can meaningfully rehabilitate people. I have seen it happening. In Parc prison—a private prison, I have to say to those on the Labour Benches—in south Wales I was awestruck by the work being done on the neurodiversity wing. Prison officers trained in the right skills were working with some of the most difficult and complex prisoners in that estate and achieving results that might not to the naked eye look terribly remarkable but which, by the measure of the people they were dealing with, were extraordinary. We need to replicate that sort of work, which is being done in one corner of the estate, across the entire prison estate.

The wider debate is all about replicating the best practice we see across Government and local government, and across private enterprise and business as well, because I do not want this debate to be just about what the Government can do—me with my metaphorical hand out, saying, “More money please.” This is about society realising that if we are going to crack the issue and make a difference, we need carefully targeted research into what works.

[Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. and learned Friend back to the Back Benches. I am sure we will be hearing more from him over the coming weeks and months. Does he agree that as well as research, on which I agree entirely, societal support is needed? Organisations such as the Caxton Youth Organisation, a brilliant youth club in my constituency for children and young people with autism and learning difficulties, can play their part in supporting young people with autism. Society and Government also have a part to play because this is about us all working together to support these young people.

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend is right. Drawing on her local government experience and having been directly responsible for many of these services she encapsulates the best practice we see in many local areas. The trouble is that we do not see it everywhere and there is, to use the dreaded phrase, a postcode lottery, which is just not good enough for so many families across our country.

I see where we are now as a moment to make a choice. There is a golden opportunity for Government and indeed for society, and I deliberately wanted to include neurodiversity in this debate because I believe it is hugely important. Diagnostic descriptions are vital for many families. Speaking from my own experience, they open a door to statutory services and obligations—statements, as we used to call them, or education, health and care plans as they became under the Children and Families Act 2014. However, the system is in danger of becoming a prisoner of that process. In the natural concern that public authorities have to conserve resources there is a danger that we start to become overly obsessed with labels and then find that if somebody is not labelled there is, to mix my metaphors, a cliff edge and nothing for the person who does not happen to get through the door marked “autism”.

Let us think about that for a moment—think about how wrong that is in terms of the lives we are dealing with. No one person just presents as autistic; they might have a range of conditions and challenges including, for example, epilepsy, which, sadly, is a very common comorbid condition with autism. There are also other conditions that might fall short of autism but if undiagnosed the consequences can be baleful, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, attention deficit disorder, dyslexia and other types of impairment that mean that people cannot access education, for example, in the way that neurotypical people can. These conditions might not be seen as acute compared with some other conditions that are diagnosed but can lead to disaster for the individual if they are not diagnosed.

School exclusion—I see the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) in her place—is the most obvious consequence. That is a particular issue, and the disengagement with the system that it can lead to all too often leads to a descent into criminality, which, frankly, then brings us back to the criminal justice outcomes that I have been wrestling with all my professional life and in my ministerial incarnation. In devising the right type of support, we need to try to put the process in its proper context. We must remember that this is about the person and centre something on the individual and their needs.

I am delighted after many years to renew my association with Autistica, our country’s leading autism research organisation. Today, by happy coincidence, it published an excellent support plan on autism. Having read it very carefully, I think it is groundbreaking. It is targeted, and it tries to move the debate in a direction in which I think all of us, including the families and those who have autism, would like to see it go. That contribution follows from the Government’s own commitment, in the revised autism strategy published at the end of July, to improve autism research, to improve innovation and to look for examples of best practice.

As we near a very important moment in the life of our country, with the Department’s publication later this year of the long-awaited White Paper on social care, Autistica has identified a gap in research—and guess where the gap is, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is in social care. We have learned so much about genetics and about the causes or the reasons for autism. That has been incredibly important in understanding that this is a condition, not an illness or a disease, and that there is no cure, and in moving away from all that redundant language and understanding the condition for what it is—and celebrating it too, by the way. We do not do enough of that. We tend to view it as some sort of wicked problem. For many people, it is actually their life; it is who they want to be and how they want to be recognised. We must never forget that.