Meeting of the Parliament 11 December 2025
The RCP’s report lays out in clear and evidence-based terms what many of us have been warning of for years. Demand has soared. As of March 2025, more than 42,000 children and 23,000 adults were waiting for a neurodevelopmental assessment. We are not talking about a marginal increase. Since 2020, children’s waits have risen by more than 500 per cent, and adults’ waits have risen by 2,200 per cent. Those numbers represent lives on hold: children becoming adults and being sent to the back of the queue again; parents in despair; and adults left without clarity, support or hope.
However, let us be clear: the scale of the crisis is not simply the result of increased demand; it is also a result of the fact that, for years, the Government has reassured itself that everything is fine. It is most certainly not fine and, shamefully, the Government knows it because it has conflated data, changed the way in which data is collected and used flawed data to game the system.
The royal college’s recommendations are not radical and they are not rocket science. As Daniel Johnson said, access to medication is pretty basic. The recommended actions are the basic building blocks of a functioning system. The Scottish National Party Government should have put in place a clear national pathway with timely diagnosis and treatment and seamless support years ago. Instead, we have chaos.
Data collection is fundamentally poor. NHS Grampian cannot separate neurodevelopmental cases from child and adolescent mental health service cases in the data. We cannot even understand the scale of need. NHS Lanarkshire provided data that was two years out of date, and when we phoned the board, we learned that the real waiting time is two years longer than was publicly reported. That is not transparency.