“Time to Deliver” Template Letter

Time to Deliver template – In response to the house of lords report, please see a draft template you can use and edit to send to your MP.

The more people who contact their MP the more we can make a difference.

Either copy and edit the text below, or click here or on the image above to download a .docx template.

Dear,

The House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Autism Act 2009 published its report, ‘Time to Deliver: the Autism Act 2009 and the new autism strategy’ on 23 November 2005. It outlined a series of targets and recommendations for the Government’s next steps when the current autism strategy ends in July 2026. The report is lengthy and detailed, drawing on evidence from autistic people, carers of autistic people and autism organisations. Since the publication of the report, the Government has issued a brief response. As [an autistic person/a person close to someone who is autistic], I want to urge the Government to take note of the recommendations of the ‘Time to Deliver’ report and to highlight issues in some of the ways the Government response appears to conflate autism and mental health conditions.

The Government’s response to the ‘Time to Deliver’ report does not set out a timeline for meeting key goals, nor does it outline plans for the creation of autism-specific initiatives (as recommended by the Committee). Instead, the Government response signposts existing plans such as the 10 Year Health Plan, an initiative which does not offer any specific consideration of autistic people’s experiences and needs. The lack of clarity and detail in the Government’s overly broad response is compounded by the Government’s muddled conflation of mental health and neurodivergence. The ‘Time to Deliver’ report notes in its section on misconceptions about autism that “Autism is not a mental health condition” (p. 24). Despite this, the Government response conflates autism and mental health in troubling ways.

Historically, autism was viewed as a form of schizophrenia. In the postwar years, autism was thought to be the result of poor parenting (particularly from mothers). More recent decades have seen shifts in public discourse, with autism being framed as “problem” caused by vaccines or even Tylenol. Each of these discourses has promoted damaging ideas about autism being an illness that needs to be prevented or cured. The upcoming independent review into “mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”, launched by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on 4 December 2025, has genuine potential to promote greater understanding of neurodivergent experiences of mental ill-health. However, for this to be the case, it is crucial that the Government does not reiterate the erroneous perspective that autism is itself a mental health problem.

The Government response to the Lords’ Select Committee report suggests that the new independent review will ‘look to understand the similarities and differences between mental health conditions, ADHD and autism, regarding prevalence, prevention and treatment’ (p. 14). This could be useful if the review intends to look at the experiences of people with ADHD and autistic people who also experience mental ill-health, but the Government must be clear that autism and ADHD are not mental illnesses. This distinction is imperative in ensuring that autistic people are not placed in the harmful position of having mental health treatments used to try to “cure” their autism. The Government should therefore be cautious when using terms like “prevention” and “treatment” in the same sentence as autism. The history of efforts to “prevent” and “cure” autism overlaps with the history of eugenics. The pathologisation of our difference has been used to suggest that we are less than.

Similarly, where the Government response to the ‘Time to Deliver’ report discusses the ‘risks and benefits of medicalisation’ (p. 14), it is vital that autistic people are listened to on this matter. As the Select Committee point out in various parts of their report, diagnosis can have intrinsic benefits in terms of self-understanding. This must be acknowledged.

As it stands, the Government’s response to the Select Committee’s ‘Time to Deliver’ report has been criticised by organisations like Autistica, the National Autistic Society and Autism Alliance UK. The response does not inspire confidence that the Government will now act with a greater understanding of autism. It also does not meaningfully engage with the recommendations to develop autism-specific initiatives as part of a new plan ready for implementation in July 2026. Please can you do all you can to ensure that the Government creates and implements a new autism strategy, one that properly incorporates recommendations from the Select Committee report, in time for the end of the current strategy.

Kind regards,