Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve the collection of data on the needs of autistic children and adults in the health and social care system.

NHS Digital started collecting and reporting on autism diagnosis waiting times in November 2019. These are experimental statistics and NHS Digital are working to improve the data quality and completeness of these statistics for future use.

We are reviewing our autism strategy and we are extending it to include children. We expect the revised strategy will have a focus on improved data collection and reporting. We expect to publish this as soon as possible.