As a later in life diagnosed autism at age 55 myself, diagnosed in 2021, we need to get involved in political activism to push for far-reaching, innovative and groundbreaking legislative change and proper services for autistic people, based on international best practice, while making far greater use of modern technologies, the most important of these changes being that the post diagnosis assessment following initial diagnosis must become a basic legal entitlement and mandatory legal obligation and responsibility on all healthcare providers in the U.K. including the NHS, with the post-diagnosis assessment report, carried out every 12-18 months, will become a legally binding document, circulated to all providers as appropriate, clearly setting out the legal obligations of each statutory body - crucially, all mental health and hidden disability, needs its own separate statutory body, properly funded, properly managed, away from the NHS entirely - it is scandalously unacceptable in a supposedly caring, compassionate and civilised society underpinned by Christian ethical and moral principles that autistic people still do not have the levels of post-diagnostic support that we deserve - the administration of financial support to those with a formal autism diagnosis must be removed from the DWP and moved to this new statutory body, with legal obligations for regular training for all staff, with all assessments carried out “in-house” as the practice of “outsourcing” is both hugely wasteful of public funds, the assessments carried out by them are wildly inaccurate and are generating huge profits for large private companies - the decades long record of mismanagement and wastage in the NHS is well documented, but these laws need to be relentlessly enforced by criminal prosecutions via the CPS of all NHS senior managers involved in these scams and any new bodies - if full police investigations were carried out into many of these currently existing statutory bodies we would doubtless discover much corruption and criminality by those in positions of power within the NHS alone
