Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will take steps to include specialist autism training for community care assessors as a requirement in the Care Act 2014 Part 1 regulations.

The Care Act will require local authorities to ensure all assessors are appropriately trained to carry out assessments. This builds on the statutory guidance Implementing Fulfilling and Rewarding Lives which followed the 2010 Adult Autism Strategy for England, and which required autism awareness training to be available to all staff working in health and social care and specialist training for those in key roles that have a direct impact on access to services for adults with autism. The Department is currently consulting on the regulations and statutory guidance that will support the implementation of the Care Act, and we will remind local authorities through this of this requirement in Implementing Fulfilling and Rewarding Lives.

Due to the complexities of assessing people who are deafblind, regulations under the Care Act will require their assessments to be carried out by a specialist assessor. One of the questions in the consultation document is whether specialist assessors should be required to carry out the assessment of people with other conditions, such as autism, and to explain why this should be the case. Based on the evidence we receive through the consultation we will consider if this requirement should be extended to other conditions.