The NHS won’t
show you this
data — so we will

What have we published?

There’s been no coverage of neurodiversity news this week while we’ve been building something more useful. The NHS does not publish any consolidated data on ADHD and autism treatment. So we’ve gone ahead and done it ourselves.

Explore the map of NHS assessment data here

The infrastructure is live, but the data is still coming in.

We’ve submitted Freedom of Information requests to all 42 Integrated Care Boards in England.

The goal = create the UK’s first comprehensive public dataset showing NHS neurodivergent assessment spending, average waiting times, Right to Choose restrictions, and private sector overflow — by region, with at least three years of data.

Why now matters

You may know: the government is reviewing NHS neurodivergent treatment.

Meaning, at the very least, a review will review things and conclude things, and at the very most, reforms are coming.

Also meaning? That it’s critical to establish now more than ever, even though this should already exist, a baseline data set BEFORE any policy changes, so we can measure what those reforms actually deliver versus what they promise — while enabling the transparency of what they’ve delivered BEFORE they finally reviewed what they were delivering.

Without this dataset, there’s no accountability mechanism.

As someone personally invested in documenting the neurodivergent treatment industrial complex, I needed this infrastructure published before I start covering individual cases.

The Guardian (and other outlets) are now regularly reporting stories of the financial extortion and entrapment that’s facilitated through the broken Right to Choose system — people coerced by private providers charging thousands for assessments that should be free at the point of use in the first place, and trapped into monthly fees, while the NHS and GPs claim plausible deniability and abdicate responsible for treatment through their own system.

It’s current state: a public health system, with private tumours incentivised to grow on it, all at the expense of the neurodivergent.

What the map shows

The interactive map currently displays average waiting times, NHS budgets, private spending, and Right to Choose access and status by region.

As FOI responses arrive, the map will populate with regional comparison data. You’ll be able to see your area’s NHS budget allocation versus private sector spending. You’ll see how many assessments are happening through NHS trusts versus private providers. You’ll see which ICBs are managing demand and which have completely lost control to the haemorrhage, or are flat-out refusing to operate the NHS’s neurodivergent treatment framework (presumably waiting for post-review).

This isn’t transient news commentary. This is reference infrastructure. When journalists need data on regional NHS performance, when researchers need baseline statistics for studies, and when advocacy organisations need evidence for policy arguments — this becomes the source.

Individual stories of RTC exploitation, which we will now cover, only make sense linked with the systemic context.

The NHS operates on a fundamental principle of free care at the point of use, and when ICBs cannot provide timely assessments and people are forced into private providers just to access that care, that principle is beyond broken.

But, you can’t fix what you don’t measure, and are not held to account for. So here it is.

Update — May 2026

Three months on, the FOI infrastructure has done what it was built to do. The dataset is now populated across the 42 Integrated Care Boards in England and has produced a headline figure that did not exist before this work began: NHS private spending on ADHD and autism assessments now exceeds £500 million — public money flowing to private providers because public capacity has been allowed to collapse.

That figure has anchored the Directory’s subsequent coverage of the extraction economy. Diagnostic gatekeeping — charities now charging £2,000 for ADHD/ASD assessments examined how charitable infrastructure is now joining the same table the private clinics already occupy, with predictable consequences for the people meant to be receiving free care at the point of use.

The Fonagy Review’s interim report, examined in the three-level neurodivergent severity framework and what the overdiagnosis debate misses, was the predictable institutional response — frame the demand as “medicalisation” rather than the system’s failure to meet a population that was always there. The data published here makes that framing harder to sustain.

The baseline now exists. The reforms, when they arrive, will have something to be measured against.