On Friday 23 January, the government responded to the House of Lords’ report, “Time to deliver: the Autism Act and the new autism strategy”. The reaction has been unusually unanimous. The entire charity sector — including the National Autistic Society, Ambitious About Autism, Autistica, Autism Action, and Autism Alliance UK — have come together to condemn the government’s position.
In a press release issued the same day, the National Autistic Society stated that there is “no evidence that the government intends to develop a new national autism strategy, or do anything meaningful in compliance with the Autism Act or in response to the House of Lords inquiry. Despite the legal requirement and the expiry of the existing strategy in June, no timeline is provided.”
Unfortunately — and at the risk of undermining my own article — this is not news. The government’s lacklustre response is the culmination of years of debilitating cuts to the sector, forcing support groups to shut down for lack of funding, including the local charity Autism Oxford UK in October 2025. The group offered services from ADHD and autism assessments to peer mentoring. Speaking to the BBC, Dr Claire Brenner of the Oxfordshire SEND Parent Action Group explained that “services which are funded publicly are so overstretched that parents are being forced to go privately.”
The consequences are becoming increasingly apparent. They materialise daily in the lives of hundreds of thousands of families, and in the working conditions of those tasked with supporting them.
Josh, a student who works part-time in respite care, supports families of children and young adults with complex needs by taking support users out for the day, giving parents a well-earned break from full-time care. An essential part of his role is assessing whether future sessions should be one-to-one or two-to-one, depending on the level of risk and need.
“Recently,” he admitted, “I was asked to assess a child for one-to-one support who had really high needs. There were a couple of incidents during the session and a lot of distress. When I came back, I said to the parent, ‘I can’t recommend this as one-to-one. It’s too high-risk.’”
What followed exemplifies the systemic pressures Dr Brenner described, and which remain unaddressed. “She told me there’s been mounting pressure from social workers, who’ve said her child can only be funded as a one-to-one. That’s all they can afford funding for. She’s a single parent who can’t take him out on her own without additional care. She was really upset — she just didn’t know what to do.”
In Josh’s experience, these funding constraints are imposed without proper assessment. “The social workers hadn’t even seen the child. They didn’t know their support needs, and they were ignoring both the parent and the support workers who were saying this shouldn’t be one-to-one.”
Support staff and social workers have been pushed into an impossible position: tasked with safeguarding vulnerable individuals while simultaneously managing shrinking budgets. “The story,” Josh says, “is really about the pressure social workers are under to cut funding, and where that leaves support workers.”
This is not an isolated incident. Josh described another assessment that resulted in injury, “I was bitten. It left a scar on my right hand. This was a young man with very high needs who really required two staff [members]. The parents had told the organisation repeatedly that they couldn’t keep sending workers on their own. The response was basically: wait until something happens first.”
Of course, no one can predict when — or how — “something happens”. Support workers face physical danger, support users experience distress, and members of the public are exposed to risk. Parents, meanwhile, are left with no viable alternatives. “These are people with no options,” Josh explains, “They can’t take their children out on their own. So the kids stay at home, often in dark rooms, and just don’t go out.”
Support work has always involved risk. Workers are trained in emergency restraint techniques and crisis de-escalation. But training cannot compensate for chronic understaffing. “On a two-to-one,” Josh says, “you can avoid restraining by separating the support user from the public. You’re more prepared. On a one-to-one, everyone is more exposed.”
The government’s failure to adequately fund autism services does not merely undermine policy goals — it actively produces harm. The Autism Act was designed to ensure consistency and dignity in support provision. Instead, frontline workers are being forced to ration safety, families are being denied meaningful care, and as a consequence, autistic individuals are being excluded from public life.
Josh’s story is not exceptional. As he emphasises, it is not a criticism of social workers, but a symptom of deeper institutional negligence that extends beyond the neurodiversity sector. While the government is willing to waste nearly £30 million of taxpayers’ money on a recently cancelled bill to introduce a National Care Service for the elderly, distracted by the promise of AI silver bullets, the wider support infrastructure has been left in tatters. Political face may have been saved by last-year’s U-turn on pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, but the young, too, have been left out in the cold. Between 2010 and 2023, 1,243 council-run youth centres closed across England and Wales, inaugurating what UNISON has called a “lost generation” associated with increasing antisocial behaviour.
Look within our school system — the best microcosm of society we have, and an institution synonymous with underfunding — and the situation only worsens. Since the pandemic, the UK has faced an unresolved “attendance crisis”. One in six autistic children have not attended school since September, due in part to the lack of SEND-trained teachers, and suddenly, we find ourselves back where we began.
If the question is whether the government is supporting autistic people, the answer increasingly appears to be no. But the crisis does not end with those most vulnerable, nor even with the oldest and youngest among us. It extends to the very people struggling to hold our over-stretched care network together. Another question, then, is just as urgent: who, in this fractured system, is supporting the support workers?