What should be a conversation about meeting children’s needs has instead become yet another culture war battlefield.
‘Overdiagnosis’ has been a buzzword of 2025, at least within right-wing circles, who deploy it with remarkable confidence yet remarkably little evidence. What should be a conversation about meeting children’s needs has instead become yet another culture war battlefield.
“‘Out of control’ spending on ‘overdiagnosed’ special needs children threatens bin collections and pothole filling, claims Reform’s Tice,” splashed the Daily Mail last month, amplifying the right’s message that public services are failing not because of chronic austerity, but because too many children are being labelled “special needs.”
Tice’s unverified crusade
Indeed, the deputy Reform leader, who heads the party’s cost-cutting DOGE unit while spending much of his time in Dubai, has cast himself as a crusader against what he claims is rampant overdiagnosis of ADHD, dyslexia and autism. He even branded the sight of pupils wearing ear defenders, used routinely by occupational therapists and teachers to reduce sensory overload, as ‘insane.’ Tice’s criticism exposes not a problem in classrooms but an alarming ignorance about how neurodivergent pupils actually learn.
Tice also wants to scrap annual reviews for Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) because they cost roughly £4,000 each. That figure is correct but the inference that the cost is therefore unjustified is not. Annual reviews are the main safeguard that ensures children get the support they need. Scrapping them would not cut ‘waste,’ it would strip away accountability.
As Anna Bird, chief executive at Contact for Families with Disabled Children and Madeleine Cassidy, chief executive at IPSEA say, getting rid of EHCPs is “not the answer.”
“(EHC) plans are a vital part of the SEND system and must be protected. They provide legally enforceable rights to support for children and young people.”
But Tice doesn’t stop at ear defenders and EHCPs. He wants councils to stop funding transport for SEND pupils and has revived the right’s long-held obsession with the Motability scheme. His accusation that parents leave their Motability car “in the drive” while “demanding a taxi” to school is presented without a shred of evidence, and, predictably, left unchallenged by the Mail.
He goes further, alleging “middle-class parents” are “playing the game” to avoid VAT on private school fees by seeking EHCPs.
“They’re employing solicitors in order to file their claims.” Again, no evidence, and no verification or balance offered by the Mail.
Some balance here would require the perspectives of relevant institutions and experts, for example, the National Autistic Society.
“Claiming there is “overdiagnosis” couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Joey Nettleton Burrows, policy and public affairs manager at the National Autistic Society….Spreading these kinds of lies stigmatises autistic people and makes life harder for them and their families.”
But why would the Mail include such comments, when ‘overdiagnosis’ fits into a political and media narrative that has spent over a decade demonising disability claimants as “scroungers,” “frauds” and “cheats.” From the Sun’s 2012 “Beat the Cheat” campaign to George Osborne’s attempted £4.4bn disability benefit cuts, this demonising narrative is long-established.
Overdiagnosis or long overdue recognition?
Of course, in the school days of Tice and Farage, at the same time little was done to stamp out bullying, dyslexia “didn’t exist,” only in the sense that nobody cared to recognise it. Children who struggled were dismissed as “thick” or “weird.”
Today, many adults who grew up in that era are finally being diagnosed with ADHD, autism and other conditions, not because they suddenly became more common, but because diagnostic criteria improved and stigma reduced.
BBC Scotland reported a seven-fold increase in adults receiving ADHD prescriptions between 2013 and 2023. Increased awareness, clearer clinical guidelines, the aftershocks of the pandemic, and adults recognising their lifelong symptoms, all help explain this rise. But to the right, any increase is proof of ‘overdiagnosis’ and the need to make cuts.
The real diagnostic scandal: underdiagnosis
The human cost of late diagnosis is palpable. Just last week, my hairdresser told me she had recently received an ADHD diagnosis and begun medication. “I’ve never felt better,” she said. “If only I had been diagnosed 30 years ago, my life would have been very different.”
Her story is common. Many women in particular report feeling unable to disclose diagnoses precisely because media narratives have framed ADHD as a trivial “trend.”
“Seeing the way the condition is treated in the media has made me even less confident in talking about potentially having ADHD with those close to me,” wrote Rachel Charlton-Dailey in Glamour.
Underdiagnosis, especially if you’re not white
If there is a diagnostic crisis, it’s underdiagnosis, especially among children of colour. Studies show that Indian, Asian and Pakistani children are less likely to be diagnosed with autism than white peers. Children who speak another language at home are also significantly less likely to get a diagnosis.
Shockingly, SEND tribunal data hasn’t recorded ethnicity since 2017, making inequalities harder to track.
And while Tice complains about too many EHCPs, more than 6,000 children had been waiting over a year for one, as of June 2025. The target is 20 weeks. Families aren’t exaggerating needs, many are begging to be believed.
SEND under the Tories
14 years of Tory rule oversaw a dramatic decline in the state of the education sector. UNISON research in 2024 showed that funding fell significantly below 2010 levels, and that a child starting school that year missed out on £5,384 of education and support due to austerity-era cuts.
The results are visible daily, with larger classes, reduced student support services, fewer extra-curricular activities, and shrinking specialist provision for SEND pupils.
This reluctance within Tory ranks to take disability and mental health seriously remains to this day. Only this week, Kemi Badenoch claimed it was time to “draw a line on what health issues the state can support people with”, particularly targeting “low level mental health issues”, such as “being diagnosed with anxiety which can be worth more than £20,000 to some families.”
As well as showing a real lack of understanding, such comments reinforce a political climate in which the needs of disabled people and vulnerable children are treated as burdens rather than responsibilities.
Labour’s softly-softly version of the same narrative
It would be comforting to say this ‘panic’ is confined to the Tories and Reform. It isn’t. Labour isn’t offering an alternative vision for SEND, only a slower, more technocratic version of the same policy trajectory. Councils are overwhelmed, families are desperate, and instead of adding funding Labour is launching an independent review into rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services in England.
Earlier this year, health secretary Wes Streeting told BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that mental health conditions were being over-diagnosed and too many people were being “written off.”
But writing in the Guardian, last week, Streeting said his prior remarks had “failed to capture the complexity of this problem” and were a case of “foot-in-mouth syndrome”.
He said he decided after the interview that “this issue was too important to be left unresolved and required a proper evidence base.”
A government review is now in motion, with a white paper due in early 2026. Ministers insist it is designed to “benefit children and parents,” but as John Harris notes, its framing “has a queasy whiff” of the overdiagnosis narrative. It lumps together mental health with neurodevelopmental conditions and includes nods to “economic inactivity,” priming the ground for welfare reform by stealth.
Harris also highlights what the overdiagnosis crusaders won’t, that Britain’s hyper-competitive education system and precarious labour market are driving rising rates of anxiety and depression in young people. Add the lingering effects of the pandemic, and the idea that SEND diagnoses are a frivolous trend collapses entirely.
The return of ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking?
It is difficult to avoid wondering whether the current political assault on people with special educational needs and disabilities is really about reducing public expenditure, or whether it reflects something darker. Beneath the rhetoric of “efficiency” and “waste” lurks an older, primal belief that some lives are less valuable, less worthy, or less “fit” than others. This view echoes the discredited tenets of eugenics, which sought to “improve” humanity by excluding, sterilising or marginalising anyone who didn’t fit a narrow norm, namely disabled people, people of colour, and the working-class.
Ableism, the assumption that typical physical, intellectual, or neurological traits are inherently superior, is not the preserve of any one ideology and cuts across political lines.
Scandinavia, often held up as a model of social democracy, pursued forced sterilisation policies for decades in the twentieth century under governments that prided themselves on progress and equality. These programmes, intended to “strengthen” the Nordic population by preventing those deemed “weak” from reproducing, were not the work of a fascist dictatorship but of mainstream, elected Social Democratic administrations.
Britain’s own progressive history is not free from similar shadows. John Maynard Keynes, one of the country’s most celebrated economists, was himself a committed eugenicist at a time when the ideology held mainstream academic respectability.
Only after the Second World War, when its role in Nazi racial doctrine was exposed, did eugenics become universally discredited. The Nazi regime murdered an estimated 250,000 disabled people, framing them as burdens, “unfit,” and “life unworthy of life.”
As UNISON observed in a 2018 reflection for Holocaust Memorial Day, a “survival of the fittest” view renders disabled people worthless and disposable, a mindset that historically paved the way for atrocity. UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis warned that we must be “aware of the disastrous consequences that can result from dehumanising a particular group and infringing their rights.”
Today, that warning feels increasingly relevant and urgent. When public figures casually frame disabled children as a drain on resources or a threat to “economic productivity,” they are not engaging in neutral policy debate. They are laying the ideological groundwork for rights to be eroded, services stripped away, and human beings treated as less than fully human.
The language deployed by Richard Tice and others must therefore be recognised for what it is. Not a conversation about budgets, but the early stages of a dangerous and familiar pattern.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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