Meeting of the Parliament 01 April 2025
I thank Daniel Johnson for bringing the debate to the chamber and for sharing his personal experience, because that really does matter. I also thank organisations such as the National Autistic Society, the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities, Enable Scotland, Scottish Autism and Differabled Scotland in my region of Glasgow—to name but a few—for their tireless work on the rights of people with learning disability and neurodivergence.
This is an issue that I and, I suspect, many of us hear about regularly from constituents. I will use my time today to share some of their voices and stories. Although the Parliament has made welcome commitments, I think that we can all agree that there remains a huge gap between those aspirations and the everyday reality.
I recently met a grandmother who is the kinship carer of a young boy with autism. She told me that he had gone weeks without sleeping properly, that he had stopped eating and that he had become increasingly distressed and aggressive. She said that she had done everything right: she had contacted services, followed up and asked for help, but, months later, she was still waiting to hear back, including from child and adolescent mental health services. She is doing everything that she can to support him, but she is exhausted and still has no support.
She is not alone. Another family told me that they had been waiting more than two years for an ADHD diagnosis for their son. Without that, he cannot access sleep support or medication; without those, his wellbeing and that of his whole family are deteriorating. Their GP told them that nothing more could be done until a diagnosis was made, but there is no clarity on when that will happen.
It beggars belief that this is happening at a time when services are facing dramatic cuts. In my region, families and professionals are raising serious concerns about a reported £1.5 million cut to crucial mental health and care services—services that are already stretched. One impact will be that the planned ADHD pathway that was going to be put in place will no longer go ahead. Another impact will be that planned health checks for people with learning disabilities will not go ahead—against the backdrop that they are likely to die 25 years earlier than others. That is unfathomable.
Such cuts do not reduce need; they delay care, deepen distress and could result in the most terrible of consequences.