Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans he has to (a) review and (b) improve the autism self-assessment framework.

Working with the Department, Public Health England regularly undertakes an autism self assessment exercise with local authorities and their partners to gauge progress in implementing the Autism Strategy. The results of the self assessment and the individual returns from areas are made public so that organisations and people can challenge locally if they think that more needs to be done. The assessment questions and the process for local agreement are reviewed each time, taking into account that general continuity is needed in terms of measuring progress. The February meeting of the cross government Autism Programme Board considered the changes proposed for the next exercise which were put forward following discussions with representatives of Government departments, local authorities, the National Health Service, the autism third sector and people with autism and family carers. Further refinement will be undertaken over the next few weeks before the self assessment exercise is launched in the summer.