13
Examination of witness
Dr Marie Tidball.
Q142 The Chair: Good afternoon, and welcome back to the public meeting of the House of Lords Committee on the Autism Act 2009. We are now commencing our second evidence session of the afternoon, and in this session we are delighted to be joined by Dr Marie Tidball MP, chair of the APPG on Autism; Marie is joining us remotely. Thank you so much. You are extremely welcome, and we are really looking forward to hearing your evidence today.
Dr Marie Tidball: My pleasure.
The Chair: This is a public evidence session, and a written transcript will be taken. I once again draw attention to members’ interests as published on the committee website. Having said that, I will now ask Baroness Ritchie to ask the first question and invite you to answer it. When you do so, could you be very kind and give a brief introduction to yourself before you answer the question?
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick: Thank you, Chair. Marie, you are very welcome. In your view, what is the role and importance of the Autism Act 2009, and why has the Act been effective or not effective?
Dr Marie Tidball: I am Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge but was previously the head of the Oxford Disability Law and Policy Project. Last year I published a book called Disabling Criminal Justice, which was about the treatment of autistic defendants in the English criminal justice system. I have spent about 15 years working in disability law and policy work, but specifically with a focus on the Autism Act 2009 and the national autism strategy that subsequently flowed from that.
As colleagues will be aware, the original strategy set out around five objectives: to raise awareness of increasing our understanding of autism; to improve and develop clear pathways to diagnoses; to improve access for adults with autism to the services and support that they needed to live independently and within the community; to help autistic adults into work; and, finally, to enable local partners to plan and develop appropriate services for autistic adults. Having the first standalone Act of Parliament about a specific impairment has been very effective in raising awareness of issues affecting autistic people. It has been an effective vehicle to get local authorities and NHS organisations to look at how they provide more focused services for autistic people. There have been lots of positives, as well as enabling parents, families and autistic adults themselves to feel empowered that they have some rights underneath the Act.
I always very much see the Autism Act as providing meat to the bones of the Equality Act and what it requires for disabled people. The Autism Act builds on that to give a bit of an overview, particularly in the context of health and social care about what should be available to autistic people. That in itself is helpful, in my view, because for a long time I think autistic people were not seen to be disabled under the Equality Act. That has been another effective by-product of that—to make that connection and to enable autistic adults, in particular, to have better access to services.
Having said that, in terms of ways that it has been ineffective, the Act came through during a period where there was a transition from more national-led government policymaking, something I talked about in my book, to localism and things being done at a local level. There were very effective vehicles at that point—the autism advisory board nationally and then the autism partnership boards in some local areas—but there was a real disparity between the locality and the rollout. That shift to localism and leaving it up to local authorities seemed to lead to that being inconsistent in parts of the country, and some areas did it much better than others.
The employment element that was talked about very strongly in the autism strategy has not been as effective because there were no statutory elements within the Autism Act. The statutory components and the mandate within the Act really only apply to health and social care bodies rather than, for example, the DWP or jobcentres. That bit has been much weaker, in my experience. Then, going to local authorities, some have tried really hard. What the Act was always designed to do was to move away from this situation where mental health services said that autistic people should not have access to services and learning and disability services said that if someone had an IQ above 70 they could not, as an autistic person, have access to their services and support because they did not meet their criteria. The Act was supposed to deal with that and enable autistic people in their own right, where they did not have a co-occurring mental health problem or learning disability, to access those services. That has happened in some places, and it has happened better. Certainly the Act and the statutory guidance that came out subsequently have more effectively created that link to referral for a social care assessment, for example. However, in my experience, that does not always apply and some of that culture remained in the longer term.
Part of the problem around why that has been more ineffective has, first, been a real hole in the research about what works in terms of social care within the community. Much more work still needs to be done on what good looks like, in enabling and supporting autistic adults to live independently in the community—or, I often argue, interdependently.
The other background factor from the research that I did, which I saw as part of an interplay with the criminal justice system, was that, during the period of austerity, the cuts and changes made to local government often meant that it was much harder for high-functioning autistic people and autistic people more generally to meet eligibility criteria in local areas. It was often a real battle for them to get any care packages within the community, particularly if they had no physical personal care needs. That was a real challenge, and I think it has probably affected the rollout of elements of the Act and the statutory guidance in the ability to meet the third objective that I mentioned at the beginning, around improving access to services.
I am happy to say more, but will stop there because I appreciate that we have a number of questions to go through.
The Chair: That was incredibly helpful; thank you. I am going to come to Lord Crisp for the second question.
Q143 Lord Crisp: Thank you for joining us, Marie. From your perspective as chair of the APPG on Autism, what are the key opportunities and risks for autistic people at present and in the coming years? How can the opportunities be realised and the risks mitigated?
Dr Marie Tidball: I will mention four. The first is the Mental Health Bill that is going through Parliament and the Lords at the moment, which has opportunities for deinstitutionalisation. When the last autism strategy came out, there were 1,200 autistic individuals who were institutionalised. I think that number may well have grown since then, in early 2023.
The second is employment. As I mentioned in my last answer, that was never addressed properly through the Act or statutory guidance. We know that only three in 10 autistic people are in employment. That was highlighted by Martin Knapp as far back as 2008, and that was one of the factors that led to the Autism Act in the first place; it was around the economic impact of autistic people being outside of work and the workplace. That is an opportunity, if the work programme which the Government are looking into—Pathways to Work—takes place, but there are also risk factors around some of the things that may or may not happen, in terms of other welfare proposals. I know that we are waiting on that at the moment and do not have concrete plans on the table yet.
The third opportunity that I should mention is the work that the Government are currently doing as part of the curriculum review. There is a real chance to focus on the talents of children and young people, including autistic children and young people, and, in my view, do longer term back-mapping of career pathways. We are seeing the work that we are doing on our industrial strategy being back-mapped right through the skills strategy into the curriculum review, so that we can utilise the talents and skills of autistic people—and lots of other groups too—to maximise their chance to fulfil their potential and enter the workplace. That is a really exciting opportunity.
The work that colleagues in the justice teams are doing to look at various community sentencing provisions is hugely helpful as well. In reviewing the Autism Act at this stage, I would argue that there is a strong opportunity to make the connections in those areas that were not very strong in the initial Act.
Through all those comes the link to social care and social care support within the community, as a golden thread that enables improved opportunities for autistic people. The converse is true: if that is not there and there is no golden thread of low-level support within the community, it creates barriers for them to fulfil their potential in all those areas, they risk staying institutionalised for longer, whether in a mental health or criminal justice context, or they are not enabled to enter the workplace, which so many very much want to do.
Q144 Lord Addington: What are the key issues that autistic people raise to MPs? In your constituency work, what fills your mailbags—electronic and paper? To what extent do autistic people, their families and carers have access to the support and redress that they need when these problems arise?
Dr Marie Tidball: Those are really helpful questions. The first core issue in my post-box, and from conversations that I have had with lots of other MP colleagues, is the waiting list for diagnoses. That is still an issue for many, on which they write to us.
The second is delayed access to medication, where they have a co-occurring condition like ADHD. It is very unusual for autism itself to be treated with medication; it is usually where there is a co-occurring condition, but that in itself can exacerbate the sensory issues—for example, concentration issues that autistic people may face in their diagnostic profile.
The other thing that I often see is about access to EHCPs and inclusive teaching and learning within schools. I have been lucky recently to see some excellent provision in some local primary schools, which have set up specialist classrooms to do smaller group work with individuals with higher-level needs. There are quite a few schools that have to go down that route, which is a big priority for children not getting any support at all.
The other issue, for both children and young people and adults, is access to mental health support. Adults may end up on sectioning orders, whether a Section 2 hospital order for 28 days, under the Mental Health Act 1983, or a Section 3 order, which can be for six months or often even longer, because it can be renewed. I have had both constituents and people with whom I used to work when I worked alongside autism charities stuck on Section 3 orders in hospital for years. They would just keep cycling through them and, because there were no good-quality discharge proceedings—I still see this as a Member of Parliament—working with local authorities under a Section 117 discharge, there was none of the planning that needed to happen for them to be ready and able to be supported to live in the community.
That links to the question you asked about family support. Families tend to have to give support for a lot longer because there is not that lower-level, community-based support. It is very intense as their children and young people get the diagnosis and those EHCPs; getting that advice can be pretty traumatic for the families at times. It continues to be extraordinarily intense throughout late adulthood. In some of the case studies in my book, there were family members, mothers usually, who were in their 70s and supporting an autistic adult son who was caught in the criminal justice system. That person had not ever been offered a social care assessment, and they were carrying the burden of their quite complex needs at that stage.
Those are the issues that come up quite a lot as an MP, particularly where they have been placed out of area as there are not sufficient mental health beds in the locality—the domiciliary local authority, where they live—so they are having to go far and wide to get provision, which obviously makes it very difficult for families to be able to visit them and plan for them to come back into the community at a later stage.
Q145 Lord Addington: Just to clarify, the tiger parent never gets a chance to retire.
Dr Marie Tidball: That has been my experience. I worked with a lot of older parents when I was the policy and legal officer at Autism West Midlands, and I set up a group to try to enable them to be parent advocates, not in a legal sense but in being empowered to understand some of the law and policy that affected their child so they felt they could cope with some of the situations they were being presented with and advocate for themselves, as parents, but also for the child.
I could not tell you the numbers; I am not sure whether research has been done on the scale of support and access to services that older parents—who would be going into their 70s and, in some cases, early 80s—are still having to do to advocate for their children. In my professional experience, having worked within the autism charitable sector, and my academic experience, having done research in this area, it is certainly a pattern that I have seen time and time again. This is obviously very exhausting and has implications on their health and, in some cases, ends up being highly restrictive because community orders issued by the courts, in some situations, end up relying on them to enable the autistic person to come out of prison or come off a court-ordered section.
Q146 Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell: Thank you for joining us today, Marie. We have learned from witnesses that there is little accountability for improving support for autistic people and for disabled people more broadly. In your view, what would be the best ways to improve accountability?
Dr Marie Tidball: Thank you. This is a hugely important question. We do not need to reinvent the wheel here. When the Autism Act and statutory guidance were first put in place, as I mentioned at the beginning, there was the autism partnership board, which was based within the Department of Health. That was hugely effective. I had an autistic colleague and friends who were on that and worked very closely with the Department of Health, civil servants and others in government. That was a really useful vehicle to get a strategic overview of the work of the autism strategy and to create that connection between the national aims and objectives and the rollout in local areas. I must confess that I slightly lost track of when they got rid of that, but it has not existed for at least five years, I think. It made a huge difference and worked really well.
At a local level, as I mentioned already and was set out in the autism statutory guidance and subsequent strategies, they had to set up local autism partnership boards. I attended a couple of those in a professional capacity: sometimes I would go along and would be the speaker, or I was going along in an advisory capacity or to observe them.
That meant that autistic people had a voice within a local authority, and, most importantly, that they could give scrutiny to the implementation of the requirements in the Autism Act and the autism strategy. When they were put in place, they could be extremely effective in some cases. However, there was variety in their implementation, and I saw some where there was no training or support for the autistic members who sat on the local partnership boards. That is problematic because they were left feeling as though it was a tick-box exercise.
However, there were good examples, where service directors, including adult social services directors, would come along to speak and listen to autistic members, almost like mini Select Committees. That worked really effectively and empowered those individuals. It also led to much better join-up between health, social care and education across the authority, because they would use that as a vehicle to bring all those different areas together. That, in itself, was very effective.
We do not need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to reimplement it and have another drive to make sure that both the national autism advisory board and the local autism partnership boards are rejuvenated and put back into practice. Importantly, we need to make sure that there is a mechanism for the local partnership boards to feed into the advisory board.
A piece of work that I started to do, when I was working at Autism West Midlands, was to go around scrutiny committees in local government and to tell them what these boards did and to encourage them to undertake scrutiny review projects on this. That, again, was another useful way to create that link. With the work that the Government are doing on devolution at the moment, that might be a helpful mechanism to encourage the beefing up of scrutiny in areas of government policy that we want to see done effectively at a local level and to push the scrutiny functions within councils to do some local “check and challenge” work. Where that happened, it raised the profile of those things very effectively.
In the end, the National Autistic Society worked, I think, with the Centre for Public Scrutiny to produce a briefing on how local authorities could take that on. That took place in around 2011 or 2012. Again, we do not need to reinvent the wheel: that instrument would help the next phase of the autism strategy to be implemented and operationalised in practice.
Q147 Lord Hope of Craighead: As I am sure you understand, our task, at the end of our inquiry, will be to prepare a report with recommendations about what the Government should do to improve support for autistic people in an updated autism strategy and/or in statutory guidance. In your view, what should the Government prioritise? There are a lot of things that they could do, but what should they prioritise?
Dr Marie Tidball: One thing is around criminal justice—and I would say that, as that was the subject of my research and work. There was a real deficit from the statutory guidance of the original Autism Act not applying to criminal justice organisations. Indeed, should you so wish to read it, a whole chapter of my book explains why that was the case. That would be much improved if the Autism Act were amended, so that there is a statutory duty and the mandatory language is used in relation to criminal justice organisations.
That is the first thing I would recommend, because, sadly, where education, health and social care do not work, those intersecting and interlinking factors can often make it more likely that autistic people end up in the criminal justice system. We need to encourage work to be done downstream so that when people end up in the criminal justice system, the Autism Act applies.
Some elements within that are around data collection. What I found was that, across the criminal justice organisations, they all had different flagging systems. This might have changed in the past two years—I have to admit, having been elected only last year, I have taken my eye off the ball on that one slightly—but, certainly up to around two or three years ago, there was a variation in flagging systems and in how the data was recorded, shared across criminal justice institutions, collected and flagged on different files. So I would recommend improving data collection and flagging, which was talked about in previous autism strategies but never really got off the ground.
There is also increased work around reasonable adjustments in the court system and through police interviews as well. Again, this is an opportunity to use the Equality Act as a bridge. We can see, as I said at the beginning of my evidence, that the Autism Act can be a way of demonstrating in practice, for this particular impairment, how to extend the detail of the Equality Act in a number of areas. Criminal justice would be the first.
The second area absolutely needs to be employment. Over the years, I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with a number of autistic adults with all sorts of skills and talent. I set up a group through the charity that I used to work for, Autism West Midlands, where we would upskill them to understand law and policy. A number of them were unemployed when we started but, by the end of it, two of them had gone on to do degrees. One of them did a law degree; as he told me, but for the work that we had done with him, he would never have done that. Another did a politics degree.
Some of this is actually about enabling autistic people to have the ability to self-advocate, which is a misunderstood—or not sufficiently understood—area. I would say that, within that work around getting autistic people into employment, there is a specific piece about having independent advocates for them in that space. In particular, it is about doing work that empowers them to have a voice and to self-advocate for themselves because, for neurodivergent people, that is possibly less intuitive. It is something that they find very difficult, but it will enable them to work with others to remove the barriers that they might face in employment. Having independent advocates who can help them navigate the employment pathway would make a huge difference.
Given that we have the Mental Health Bill coming through the House of Commons and the House of Lords at the moment, and with the work that is being done with criminal justice colleagues, a real priority is very specific work on the statutory guidance on discharge into the community from both court-ordered and hospital-ordered section orders, as well as on the specific expectations around social care provision.
However, we have got to get better evidence and research on what “good” looks like. There is an enormous disparity across the country. There are a couple of good examples of that but it is sparse because, in a way, the market has not been able to respond to that need because of the austerity politics that we have seen over the past 14 years. Those have meant that only very high-level needs will get any funding packages. So the market has not been able—particularly because of how charities have been affected as well—to put in place nuanced and integrated support packages to enable those with lower-level needs to thrive in the community, to stay out of hospital and to stay out of the criminal justice system.
On that tailored discharge package, we have already got the sections of the Care Act 2014, which talks about defendants, offenders coming out of prison and where they have adult social care needs. There is already a hook, if you like, to link future autism statutory guidance to that to make it a really comprehensive piece of work that would deal with a lot of objectives that both the autism charitable sector, but also the Government, want to do in terms of keeping people out of prison and keeping them in employment and in the community. But there really needs to be a tailored piece of work around discharge from both prison and mental health processes.
I already touched on this in my earlier answer, but devolution is a real opportunity to strengthen the embedding of good practice across the country in this area, as well as revisiting the vehicles that I mentioned, such as autism partnership boards, so that autistic people have a strong voice at a local government level and are feeding into something like the former autism advisory board so that they have a stronger voice at national government level as well.
In summary, we have a mission-led Government—I say that in a non-partisan, factual way—working across their five missions. I would urge the recommendations to reflect those themes. The areas that I have mentioned already very much reflect those themes. Health, social care, criminal justice, inclusive growth and closing the employment gap for autistic people, sitting under inclusive growth, would very much come together. The same is true of transport, which is another golden thread that I have not spoken about. If you were going to ask what the final area is that links it all together, part of the reason why we are seeing autistic adults and young people being isolated and finding it difficult to get into education and the workplace is access to transport, for all sorts of reasons. That will be part of the solution for some of the above.
Lord Hope of Craighead: That was an extremely helpful answer. Thank you very much indeed. Did I pick up correctly that you thought the Act should be amended to highlight the importance of addressing the criminal justice system? There are two questions here. Are you suggesting that? Following on from that, does it really need to be amended or is it enough to just address this by recommendations to be taken up in statutory guidance?
Dr Marie Tidball: It possibly does not need to be amended, but you would need a legal mechanism in another Bill which makes sure that there is a statutory application to criminal justice bodies of any new iteration of the statutory guidance. In a way, you might not need to use the Autism Act as the parent legislation. It may be that there are other places where that could work really well. In fact, it might be that you could use the Equality Act and see this as statutory guidance linked through that to ensure that criminal justice organisations are very much seeing some of these things as reasonable adjustments. I would suggest having a read through of my chapter, where I go into it in a bit more detail. There are other ways to do it, but it absolutely should be in the statutory guidance. You could be creative and not need to reform the Autism Act itself. There are other ways of doing it, especially with a number of very relevant pieces of legislation going through Parliament at the moment.
Lord Hope of Craighead: Thank you very much. We can certainly give some thought to that.
Q148 The Chair: I will just come back to an employment question. We have heard quite a lot of evidence that employers are very nervous about taking on autistic adults and do not necessarily understand reasonable adjustments in the way that they are laid out. We took evidence from Charlie Mayfield about getting Britain back to work in terms of the disabled side of things.
How do you think Government can work with business to broaden it and encourage more employers to look at that and bring more disabled and, specifically for this committee, autistic people into the workplace?
Dr Marie Tidball: That is a really fantastic question. I am a big fan of pathways mapping. Lord Bradley started it off in 2009 with his mapping of the criminal justice system and the gaps, and why people with learning disabilities or mental health problems fall in and out of that system. We should be doing the same in an employment context to understand the barriers for disabled people at each point during the employment process, right from leaving education through to applying for jobs through to being in jobs, and what it is that leads them to barriers to entry at different stages. In relation to autistic people, there has been quite a lot of work done in terms of the application process. That is one of the biggest inhibitors for autistic people, including interviews, but it is not limited to that. We need to identify what those barriers are and what would be needed to remove them.
There is also an opportunity to think differently. There has been some brilliant work. I used to work in Herbert Smith Freehills. It is a law firm that has done some work on trying to increase and adapt its recruitment processes for the neurodivergent, including autistic applicants. So there is some good practice in business already. It recognises that diversity in applications, diversity in recruitment, benefits business—not just that company but a whole host of businesses get that. They understand the huge amount of talent that autistic people and other disabled people bring to the workplace.
I know that Mayor Andy Burnham has done a huge amount of work as well with local businesses on how they can have neuroinclusive workplaces. That is really leading the way on that front. I am sure you have already looked at the work that his authority has been doing, but if you have not done so, look at that. The other thing that we need to do is recognise that disabled people generally are dynamic in their experience of their disability, not static, and therefore our understanding of employment and what the art of the possible is in terms of disabled people being in employment is also dynamic. So we should make sure our understanding of employment changes to reflect that.
There are a couple of things there. One is increasing the opportunities for volunteering to count. I have been grateful to the Disability Minister for listening to me talk about this previously. But there are currently inhibiting factors around volunteering, affecting benefits not counting in terms of the pathway into work. I have seen that volunteering opportunities where they are well structured, where they are building confidence and skills, should absolutely be seen as a pathway into work. I have seen that in a number of spheres of my life and the benefits of that for disabled people.
I had a session on welfare changes in my constituency with a group of constituents, and one of the things that was raised with them—I was delighted because it is something that I have talked about for many years—was the opportunity to do something like time banking. There are a couple of different ways in which time banking works. One is that you look at the disabled person’s talents and match them with employers who need certain skills for focused pieces of work. You are thereby changing the way in which we are thinking of work, because we have reached a point where a lot of employees are expected to do every single aspect of a job but, actually, there will be some individuals, some disabled people, who can do some aspects brilliantly, taking segments of those jobs so that they can do them as a way to enter the workplace.
That also relieves the stress and workload for other employees. So it is mapping focused skills, which then could be linked to talents of disabled people. They are employed to then use their talents to focus on those skills. In some cases that may be very complex programming. In other cases, it might be more repetitive tasks that are very time-consuming for others to do but are really enjoyable and fulfilling for learning disabled people to do. Because disabled people very much experience their disabilities as dynamic, their energy levels will change. Their medication might affect how they operate at certain times of the day. You could time bank with a business that you will work so many hours a month, but you could do it at the points in the working day or at the points in the week where you have the mental space and the energy to do that—so you are time banking that.
The other way of doing this, which is really innovative, is that it may well be that a disabled person has lots of skills in arts and crafts, for example, so they could go into a prison and teach arts and crafts to some prisoners. That is beneficial. It is something that they need for their own well-being and to get them ready to come back into the community. But that disabled person can then get the opportunity to have some work done that they could not physically do in their own house and garden—for example, having their lawn cut or the trees cut back by young people at local colleges. So there are schemes where you are linking up businesses where they are getting the benefits of disabled people’s talents, and then, where there are things that disabled people cannot do themselves, there might be an opportunity where, for example, a business is training an apprentice tree surgeon for them to come and do some work out in the community as a kind of reciprocal response to that.
There are some really creative things that groups of disabled people up and down the country are thinking about in terms of how we rethink work. They could be really appealing to businesses for training opportunities for their staff, but also a real stepping stone to make sure that we are using the skills and talents of disabled people in a more innovative way.
Q149 Baroness Browning: Hi, Marie. Nice to see you. I should declare that I am vice-chair of the APPG under your excellent chairmanship. Could I just ask you about the Mental Health Bill? You mentioned it just now. It has passed through the Lords now, as you know, and it is to remove autism as a mental health condition from the 1983 Act. When we get situations where an autistic person, particularly an adult, has a meltdown—for want of a better expression—for one reason or another, the Act is suggesting that there will be more appropriate places for that person to be cared for, rather than them going off to police station cells or A&E departments, and that there will be facilities in the community to deal with that situation. I just wondered what sort of thoughts you have got on what that facility would look like.
Dr Marie Tidball: In the community?
Baroness Browning: Yes.
Dr Marie Tidball: I think it should be a form of wraparound provision that probably had an element around enabling some life skills training. That would be one component, because managing budgets and those sorts of things can often be very challenging. Self-advocacy skills I have mentioned already, but there is also accessing services. In two of the case studies in my research, where there was recidivism, one of the reasons was because actually they could not register themselves for a GP surgery. That meant they were not getting the psychosocial support that they were supposed to be getting—indeed, that the court had prescribed—because no one had enabled them to register with a GP. It also should be about linking them up with local services.
There is a huge opportunity; going back to the point about innovative ways of working, in my experience, autistic people have an enormous amount of talent to bring to the table. Self-employed work is a way for them to make work fit around them. I have had a couple of autistic colleagues who have set themselves up as self-employed to do work training about autism and various other things. Actually, by enabling and teaching skills in that sort of environment, somebody in the circumstance that Baroness Browning described could set themselves up as self-employed, so that they have flexible work opportunities and a way to earn money that is well paid and that motivates them. That would really help. It has to be a kind of wraparound approach that looks at their ability to build social capital, to access services for themselves and to self-advocate for that, and to engage with and become part of the community.
For example, a constituent came to one of my surgeries, but no one who had been doing their EHCP assessment work—this was somebody in their early 20s—had looked at the opportunities for autistic people to go out into the community and do volunteering and work locally. Some of it is matchmaking with what is available locally, and that is not signposting. I get really cross when I hear the word “signposting”; it is really about making that introduction and maybe sending a buddy with them. Mind uses the buddy system and, in the circumstance that was mentioned, we need that kind of buddy role. You may call it a buddy, a self-advocate or an independent advocacy role, but it is someone who can go out with them.
For example, in my constituency, there is an amazing charity, Greave House Farm Trust, which does FarmAbility-type things with autistic adults and those with learning disabilities. Then, on travel training, I made a point previously that part of the reason that autistic people become isolated and find it hard to get into work is about that confidence and ability to use public transport and know how to pay for it. At a recent event that I went to, I discovered that somebody had not had the confidence to renew their bus pass when they moved house and changed area. Those are very small things from an able-bodied, non-neurodivergent person’s perspective, but they are significant stones in the way of progress for quite a lot of neurodivergent and autistic people.
The Chair: Marie, thank you so much. I am incredibly grateful for your very valuable time. I think you can probably hear the committee members; they are all saying “fantastic evidence”. Thank you very much indeed for your time, experience and insight. If there is anything else that you think the committee needs to know or, if you suddenly think, “It would be really helpful to add that”, please either drop us a line or we would be very happy to have a further chat. We are very grateful for you taking the time to attend from your constituency.
The committee meets again in public on Monday 23 June. In the meantime, this public meeting is concluded and I draw today’s evidence session to a close.
