Call for evidence launched to mark World Autism Acceptance Day

2 April 2025

To mark World Autism Acceptance Day, the House of Lords Committee on the Autism Act 2009 is today launching its Call for Evidence inviting written contributions to its inquiry.

Be aware that written evidence sent to the Committee will usually be published online. Your name will usually be published too.

The following versions of the Call for Evidence will be available:

Background

The Committee wants to understand how well the Autism Act, the Government’s autism strategy and the statutory guidance are working so that it can make specific, practical recommendations about what the Government should do next.

The committee is seeking evidence on key questions about how to improve support for autistic people, including:

How can public understanding and acceptance of autistic people be improved?
How can the Government improve assessment, diagnosis and post-diagnostic support?
How can the Government improve the identification and support of autistic people when they need it (including if they do not have a diagnosis)?
How can access to healthcare be improved?
How can community support be improved?
How can access to education be improved?
How can support for autistic people to find and stay in work be improved?
How can support for autistic people who are in contact with the criminal and youth justice systems be improved?

The Committee wants to hear from a wide range of people and organisations with different experiences and perspectives. We particularly welcome your views if any of the following apply to you:

you are an autistic person (including if you have a diagnosis or if you consider yourself autistic)
you have an autistic person in your family, or you care for/support an autistic person
you work with autistic people in your job
you work on research into how to support autistic people.

To give everyone interested the opportunity to respond, the call for evidence is open for two months, which is longer than usual. The committee invites interested people to submit written evidence by Monday 2 June 2025.

We are very grateful to autistic people working with national autism charities who gave us feedback on the Call for Evidence document to help us make it accessible.

We want to make sure you can send us evidence in a way that works for you. You are welcome to:

work with someone else (such as a friend, family member or carer) to prepare your evidence
ask someone else to submit evidence on your behalf
ask for help from an organisation that supports you to prepare your evidence
submit a voice recording as evidence, which we will transcribe into a published written document

You should try to make sure that your submission is no more than six pages long in total. If your submission is longer than six pages, you should include a one-page summary. This is because we may receive a lot of submissions from different people and we want to be able to consider each one carefully.

You can:

send us your written submission using the form available at https://committees.parliament.uk/call-for-evidence/3625/
send your written submission or voice recording by email to HLAutismAct2009@parliament.uk. Please give your email the title ‘Written Evidence’ to make clear that you are submitting written evidence.

Further information is available on the Committee’s website. You can contact us at HLAutismAct2009@parliament.uk if you need help to send us your evidence, or if anything is unclear.