Mr. Niall Brunell:

I might ask colleagues to come in on this in a moment. In general terms, a huge amount of work is going on around access and improvements. One of the issues we see in any consideration of this Bill is the extent to which creating additional legislative obligations actually helps us to address those issues. When we talk about what could be recruitment and retention difficulties, we know that children's disability network teams, CDNTs, are understaffed, and there is a recruitment and retention challenge for which an awful lot of work has been done. One of the issues, in looking at the Bill under current consideration, is that the creation of additional legal obligations does not actually help us to deal with those issues on the ground. Say there is an assessment of needs process under the Disability Act 2005. We know very well there are challenges in relation to it. As for the solution to addressing those challenges, it is not clear from the language of the Bill why creating a separate stream that is autism-specific really drives any improvement in that regard. In fact, it runs the risk of splitting efforts or having to create separate administrative systems or risking legal uncertainty where a person with autism might be entitled to an assessment of need under something arising from an autism spectrum disorder Bill and under conditions under the Disability Act 2005.

We need to be clear that when we are talking about operational difficulties, and while there is an understandable attraction about saying a legislation timeline means everybody has to comply with the law, the lesson from the assessment of need process is that where there are structural or infrastructural difficulties that mean we are not complying, the solution to that is to improve those structures and that infrastructure, not necessarily to generate additional legislative targets. When these are missed, time that clinicians and therapists should spend delivering services becomes time and effort that colleagues in the HSE will have to spend dealing with the legal exposure.