Autism Bill

I agree about the scale of the problem. I am not 100 per cent. certain in my own mind—I say this as a lay person—whether there is a greater prevalence now than there was before. I think that we are identifying more people on the spectrum than we did before. The hon. Member for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound), who was in the Chamber earlier, asked my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham to define autism. It is not new. It is relatively new for it to be talked about, and wonderful that so many MPs are talking about it. However, it is relatively new in this country in this context. It was first identified in the 1940s by a German called Kanner, and at about the same time an Austrian called Hans Asperger identified Asperger's syndrome. Speaking as a parent who has a child who was born in 1971, I find that people understood autism in its most profound sense of Kanner autism, particularly at the most extreme end of the spectrum where children would have to be looked after for 365 days a year, might self-mutilate and would never have language. However, the other end of the spectrum—Asperger's syndrome—was known in other parts of the world but was not recognised here until much later, long after we started the statementing of children in schools and suchlike. It is not new in that sense, but it is relatively new in this country for us to have a greater understanding of the spectrum and the condition. That is why we are now recognising that there are more such people, although I remain to be convinced that there are more now than there were.