Driving Change: Insights & Policy Summaries

Key Learnings from Parliamentary Inquiries

By 2023–25, successive Select Committees and APPG inquiries highlighted the same failures: disconnected policy, inconsistent commissioning, outcome blind-spots, and reliance on short-term pilots. Oral evidence exposed familiar themes:

Disconnected policy between health, education, and employment.
Absence of consistent local commissioning standards.
Failure to measure outcomes for autistic and neurodivergent people across their lifespan.
Over-reliance on short-term pilots that vanish with funding rounds.

Everyone, clinicians, parents, autistic adults, commissioners, said the same things:

“We don’t need another strategy, we need implementation.”

There is complete frustration with Government promises; Ministers announce plans, providers see no change, patients wait years, parents burn out, and local systems say they have “no capacity.”

This is compounded by a lack of commissioning standards, no financial alignment between funding pots, and a lack of lived-experience power.

The Collective's Unique Answer

Key Learnings from Parliamentary Inquiries

The Neurodiversity Collective is positioned as:

✔ The Delivery Engine Government Doesn’t Have A place where policy becomes practice.

✔ The System Integrator NHS & LAs Cannot Build Alone We join up health, education, employment, justice.

✔ The Accountability & Data Framework Missing Since 2009 A national outcomes scorecard across 7 domains: diagnosis, education, crisis, employment, adjustments, justice, economic value.

✔ The Partnership Model That Fixes the “pilot problem” Pilot → Proof → Package → Scale (Instead of pilot → vanish).

✔ The Only National Body Combining: Commissioners, private sector innovation, trusts/foundations, research & science, lived experience.

✔ The place Government can confidently point to and say:

“This is where implementation happens.”

Implementing Government Intent

Key Learnings from Parliamentary Inquiries

Implementing Government Intent

Based on your reviewed policies, the Collective directly supports:

Autism Act 2009: Helps LAs meet duties with standardised, evaluated delivery models.

Think Autism (2014): Converts vague statements into measurable pathways.

Children and Families Act 2014: Delivers real-world inclusion in schools + transitions frameworks.

Care Act 2014: Operationalises wellbeing, independence, prevention.

Equality Act 2010: Provides employers with audited reasonable adjustment models.

Autism Strategy 2021–26: Fills the implementation gap through partnership, outcome measurement, pilot evaluation, and system reform.

Select Committee 2023–25 findings: The Collective becomes the mechanism for “implementation, not another strategy.”