31ten Consulting were commissioned through a tender process to develop the Suffolk All Age Autism Strategy. Contract commencement date 1st January 2023. The contract spend for this work was £99,730 excl. VAT
Source: Suffolk County Council - Freedom of information request.
Open Letter to Suffolk County Council
On behalf of the Lived Experience Group (LXG), thank you for sending the email regarding dates.
Unfortunately, your response falls short of our requests and overlooks crucial information needed to advance this strategy and address the problematic decisions made by SCC since 31Ten Consulting transferred the strategy.
To reiterate our concerns again:
- The streamlining of the strategy after months of consultation was done without autistic input and is therefore not fit for purpose. Suffolk Autism Strategy drafts were 119 pages long and those were trimmed to 36 pages without any input or consultation with autistic people, or informing those involved that such a process was happening. What is important to autistic people and what makes a difference to us, is not always obvious to neurotypical people – a clear theme of the consultation - so it was completely inappropriate and showed ignorance of the consultation to exclude us from that process. The resulting strategy is therefore something that is not fit for purpose.
- The strategy does nothing to support the understanding or life chances of autistic people in Suffolk, especially those older adults who are late diagnosed. The phrase ‘late diagnosis’ is mentioned but nothing about it. There is no discussion or mention of burnout in later life due to a lifetime of masking that causes so many of the mental health issues and costs employers in the loss of good staff and time and money. There are also other key factors in terms of understanding of life chances that are entirely absent e.g. intersectionality. These are key to any autistic strategy.
- The strategy does not set out “wishes, needs and ambitions of our autistic community in Suffolk” as it claims in the Foreword and Introduction. The stories and experience of the Lived Experience Group have been entirely excluded from the actual strategy and the actions associated with it. We talked in the Lived Experience Group and in the overall partnership meetings throughout the consultation process about “Nothing About Us Without Us” a long standing disability rights principal, which was in the original draft and taken out in the final version, despite this being the most important principle in any strategy that’s supposed to be for a minority group.
- Our treatment since the consultation process shows clearly that we are not considered by SCC to be the “foundation” of the Suffolk Autism Partnership board, despite the published strategy claiming this. In a recent draft agenda for a partnership board meeting we were asked for our feedback and took time to give it on what should be included and the published agenda we then found had removed our input entirely. This follows a pattern of ignoring, dismissing and misinterpreting our input, which is not only rude, it shows a complete ignorance of everything that the consultation process discovered to be key for any successful autism strategy.
- Important voices have been lost in this process because of the continued mistreatment of autistic people involved in it, and the mental well-being of those involved has been negatively affected. It is our belief and our experience from talking to others that those that were active members of the Lived Experience Group during the consultation have stepped back due to this treatment. Their stories not being heard and their input being ignored. Trust is hugely important to autistic people, as is our sense of justice and this has meant that many have had to step back in order to protect their own well being and mental health. Which is a great irony, because this strategy was meant to improve not worsen the well being of autistic people in Suffolk.
- Despite our request for autistic representation from the council, the council officials who have been chairing our meetings have not been neurodivergent and shown no understanding of autistic communication making meetings unproductive and frustrating – particularly as clear information on what needed to be known and how important that was having been given in depth during the consultation. We tried expressing our concerns several times along the process about the potential of older adults being excluded and autistic needs not being supported in the process. For example, We reiterated this again at the meeting on 15th October – when in particular we asked about being excluded from the streamlining process. Our concerns were ignored and we were told by the council official charged with running the meeting that they thought it was ‘a great strategy’ whilst ignoring us saying it wasn’t and didn’t meet needs, and in the next breath telling us our voices were important. These things are contradictory, and not understanding that making contradictory statement is not acceptable but also really hard for autistic people means that this strategy clearly hasn’t even impacted the person in charge of engaging with us over it. It is therefore clearly not fit for purpose. In our discussion together following that meeting several of us felt very gaslit and frustrated by not being heard after all of the energy and effort we have put into sharing our experiences.
- The continued attempts to deal with this problems by meeting with us individually or dividing our input are disturbing and show poor understanding of autistic needs, communication and culture. The fact that the response in the meeting of 15 October to our concerns was to ask us to meet individually is very disturbing, given that we support each other in those meetings that can be really personally challenging as we are talking about things that can be traumatic for us, and also because in terms or executive function, we are not able to engage for significant periods of time with large amounts of information without taking breaks, we rely on each other to ‘tag team’ in that situation, so again offering 1 to 1, from the person in charge of engaging with us, shows that the strategy hasn’t educated her to our needs, so how can it hope to educate anyone else. These attempts to just communicate with one of the group, or communications that have left out key members of the LXG have continued despite us explaining this.
- We are being asked to provide consultant level expertise — a level of expertise that we would charge other clients for — and use considerable amounts of our time without being paid. We remain concerned that the Lived Experience Group are being asked to share their experience and give their time for free, whilst council employees and other stakeholders are all being paid. If there is money to pay them, there is budget and it should be shared equally amongst contributors, given that research shows that autists are more likely to be in poverty than other groups, and self-employed autists – as many of the Lived Experience Group are – are literally giving up their work time to contribute. There is no reason they couldn’t be paid as consultants in the same way other consultants have been for this strategy. The response to this has been dismissive and insulting – in particular the response from SCC that they would consider bringing in external expertise, and their refusal to respond to our comment that if there was budget for that there would be budget to pay us, who are actual experts.
Unfortunately the response to us raising these concerns both at meetings and in writing has so far been at different times to ignore, to justify, to misinterpret, to delay and as above, to insist that we continue to give our consultant level expertise for free to rectify this problem, despite already having given hundreds of hours of our professional expertise in the consultation already.
Most recently, when we said that we would only consider this if the theme specific workshops we proposed had people in them for each subject area that were decision makers who could make real lasting change, we were asked to commit to dates without any mention of specific themes, agendas or decision makers. Another incidence of our specific, clear input being ignored.
So, despite months of seeking proper representation and acknowledgment, we find ourselves at an impasse. SCC has taken only minimal steps to address the LXG's serious concerns about the Suffolk Autism Strategy.
Given this situation, we must now bring SCC's inaction to media attention. We will also create an online resource documenting the lack of meaningful progress following the extensive and costly consultation process conducted by 31Ten Consulting.
We are currently seeking advice about our available options.
We will inform you of our next steps in due course.
On behalf of the Lived Experience Group - Suffolk.
