Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to treat developmental language disorders in line with autism by matching levels of freely available support, training and information for parents and carers.

Community health services, including children’s speech and language therapy, are locally commissioned to enable systems to best meet the needs of their communities. NHS England is working with the Department for Education to identify and support children with speech, language, and communication needs by co-funding pathfinder sites to deliver the Early Language Support for Every Child programme.

The programme aims to identify and support children and young people in their early years and primary school settings with mild to moderate speech, language, and communication needs, reducing the rate of specialist referrals, and increasing workforce capacity through innovative workforce models.

On 5 April 2023, NHS England published a national framework and operational guidance to help integrated care boards (ICBs) and the National Health Service to deliver improved outcomes for people referred to an autism assessment service. The guidance also sets out what support should be available before an assessment and following a recent diagnosis of autism. Since publication, NHS England has been supporting systems and services to identify where there are challenges for implementation and how they might overcome these.

The Medium-Term Planning Framework, published 24 October, was explicit that ICBs and providers are expected to optimise existing resources to reduce long waits for autism assessments and improve the quality of assessments by implementing published guidance.