Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:27 pm on 11 May 2022.
That was 'cheers' from Joyce Watson there. Diolch, Llywydd. I will get started if you set my timer to now, please. I'm glad to give a minute of my time to Laura Anne Jones and to Mark Isherwood, at their request, so I think then that'll leave me with 12 or so minutes, so I'll assume that's correct. I can never remember the right time.
When we stand for election, we stand to support those people in our community and those causes that we strongly believe in, and when I stood for election, autism was one of those things that I wanted to stand up for, and I never dreamt that it would be directly affecting me and my family, because I was elected in 2016, and it wasn't until 2018 that my daughter was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder. And as a parent, it kind of creeps up on you—certainly as a parent of a first child, with no baseline to compare it with—and it was actually my parents who said to me, on holiday, 'I think Caitlin may be autistic', because of her significant speech and language delay. And sure enough, that was the diagnosis we had.
Therefore, I'm kind of living this pathway that parents in my constituency are living, too, and far from it being selfish for me to raise this debate, what I'm trying to do is raise it on behalf of those parents that I've worked with as a result of my work as a constituency Senedd Member, and I think having the insights myself has been very important in giving me that ability to represent them effectively, because I am on the same journey. Caitlin had to wait a year for a statement, which she should not have. She was a year in mainstream when she should have been in a resource base, so I've had this experience, this frustration that people have at the delays that happen because of the multidisciplinary nature of autism and the requirements of so many people in so many parts of the public sector to agree on what is needed.
So, there are huge challenges, huge challenges, although we do have fun as well. In my community, we've got many voluntary groups. Two in particular come to mind: the Valleys Daffodils, who meet in Gilfach YMCA, just underneath my office. They meet every Saturday morning and they do a wonderful job. We've been along there. And also the Sparrows ALN group, which is active across my constituency, run by Nana Deb. Nana Deb was going to be going to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen, but unfortunately she wasn't well enough to go, and I suspect that's why the Queen won't be attending the garden party this year. We attend Cefn Fforest swimming pool every Saturday. At first, Caitlin used to say to me, 'Bye-bye, swimming. Bye-bye, swimming.' And I'm glad to say now, every Saturday morning, she says, 'Hello swimming. Hello swimming', which means she wants to go. I couldn't live without some of that support that exists in the constituency. Meeting parents who have very similar problems to mine and hearing their stories is really, really important, and how similar—although the condition presents itself in different ways, how similar the problems that parents have on that route to finding support for autism.