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 ensure that autistic people are not placed inappropriately in psychiatric wards and units.

NHS England’s full programme of work in line with the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health is predicated on services being commissioned to provide patients with timely access to evidence-based care as early as possible and as close to home as possible where appropriate. This includes home treatment teams and wider community mental health services.

More than £400 million is being invested in crisis resolution and home treatment teams to ensure that people across the country are able to access a 24 hour, seven days a week community based crisis response and intensive home treatment as a safe and effective alternative to hospital admission. By 2021, all areas should have crisis resolution and home treatment teams.

A further £249 million is being invested in liaison mental health services in every acute hospital, ensuring that at least 50% of acute hospitals have dedicated on-site 24 hours/seven days provision.

As set out in ‘Building the Right Support’, the national plan to develop more community services for people with learning disabilities and/or autism who display behaviour that challenges, including those with a mental health condition, and to close some inpatient facilities, any funding released by the transfer of patients from inpatient to community-based or other models of care will be reinvested in those better alternatives to hospital. In 2018/19, NHS England’s specialised commissioning function has transferred £53 million of funds, previously allocated to secure in-patient care, to Transforming Care Partnerships so that they can support new individual support packages for the patients discharged, or invest in new community services.

The priority attached to improving care for autistic people with behaviour that challenges is reflected in the inclusion of both autism and mental health as clinical priorities in the forthcoming NHS long-term plan, which will set the ambitions to improve health services in England over the next decade.