Autism Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman). I begin by saying a warm and personal thank you to my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan). She has brought this Bill before the House today, but I know of her long-term interest. I am immensely grateful to her, not just as a colleague but as a friend, for picking up the remains of my ten-minute Bill of last year and choosing it as the first Bill from the private Members' Bill ballot. I also thank many other Members for their support and interest over the years; this is getting to sound like a swansong, although I hope this is not the last time that I speak on autism in the House. Autism has been important to me. I am sure that many Members will know that I have a 37-year-old son with Asperger's syndrome. Furthermore, I have been pleased to be involved in the issue as vice-president of the National Autistic Society and patron of Research Autism. I should say to the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) that my family and I are eternally grateful to the Wessex Autistic Society for its support over many years. I have listened to the Minister and talked to him about the Bill. I have read what he has said. Like everybody else in the House, I welcome the measures that he announced in response to the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham. We all welcome them, but as Members from all parties have already said, the House is looking for a sea change in how we approach autism. It is true that a lot has been done over the years, and I pay particular tribute to children's services and the field of education. We are not there yet; I am not complacent in any way. However, I am often invited to schools for children with autism and sometimes to residential care institutions for such children. When I compare those children with their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, I see a generation who have an autistic spectrum diagnosis but who are more confident because of the more appropriate care and support that they get. Many of them will come to their teens and adulthood with a greater and more positive expectation of what life will be like for them than did previous generations. That is why in the past few years I have tended to concentrate my own interests on adult services. My fear is that the current generation, having had their expectations built up, will be let down when they reach that all-important transition period, which has been mentioned and is an important part of the Bill. I am thinking, not least, of adulthood. I hear the good intentions, but I say to the Minister that the issues have to be enshrined in regulations and statutes that will work. That is important. Yes, promises have been made in the past, and one of them was made to me. It was to do with my ten-minute Bill. The National Autistic Society wrote to me—I have the letter here somewhere—saying I would have to alter my speech of the following week because the Government had already announced they were going to do a prevalence study. I was delighted, and altered my speech accordingly. However, as the Minister knows because we have discussed the issue, here we are at the end of February 2009 and that prevalence study has not yet started. I do not doubt the Minister personally, but we need to give proper protection to those whom this legislation will help. I am, as I said, a vice-president of the National Autistic Society and am only too well aware of its welcome for the moves that have been made, and it has made that clear to Members of Parliament. However, I do not wear just that one hat. I am a parliamentarian and understand the importance of scrutiny. I shall give a short example. In our cordial discussion the other day, the Minister referred to a document in which the term "autism" was used. I had to ask him what we meant by that. Were we talking about statemented autistic children or autistic children with a special educational need? The Minister rightly said that we would have to discuss and clarify the matter. What better place to do that than in Committee? That is what the Committee stage of a Bill is for. It is important to get things right in Committee and for people to know about the Government's intent.