Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of local authorities do not have specialist autism teams in (a) England and (b) Wales.

Information on how many and what proportion of local authorities currently do not have specialist autism teams in England. The last available data for England was published in the latest Autism Self-Assessment Framework (SAF) in 2018. The SAF was a voluntary data collection exercise, which asked several questions to local authorities in England about how they were implementing the national ‘Think Autism’ Strategy locally. This included questions about whether their diagnosis services were integrated with mainstream statutory services with a specialist awareness of autism for diagnosis or a specialist autism specific service. 81% of responding authorities stated that they had a specialist service.

Each integrated care board is expected to have an Executive Lead for learning disability and autism to support them to deliver care and support for autistic people in their area. NHS England recently published statutory guidance on these Executive Lead roles.