Former Conservative cabinet member and MP for South Swindon, Sir Robert Buckland, has criticised what Tory leadership candidate has said about autism and anxiety.

Ms Badenoch, who is one of the two candidates to be put before the Conservative membership on the last day of October, has co-written a pamphlet Conservativism in Crisis, which decried what it describes as the “better treatment” and “economic privileges and protections” afforded to people with autism and conditions such as anxiety.

It said the conditions, which it put together, had gone from something “people should work on themselves as individuals” to “something that society, schools, and employers have to adapt around” and diagnoses as neurodiverse had gone from “an individual-focused challenge” that “meant you could understand your own brain” to something that “offers economic advantages and protections”.

It added that diagnoses of anxiety or autism were being treated similarly to race or sex discrimination and that children with the conditions “may well get better treatment or equipment at school” including transport to and from home and the requirement for schools and workplaces to make adjustments for it had “created costs and failed to improve people’s mental health outcomes”.

Sir Robert, who was a cabinet colleague with both Ms Badenoch and her leadership rival Robert Jenrick, took issue with a number of the pamphlet’s statements.

He was critical of the conflation of anxiety and autism as being similar and told the i newspaper: “Anxiety is not a neurodiverse condition, autism is not a mental health condition.

“That part of the report didn’t seem to me to be based on any evidence, and mixing up autism with mental health is not right. It’s not the correct approach to be taken into this.”

When he was an MP Sir Robert carried out the official government Buckland review into the barriers faced by people with autism in finding work.

It found that at least 700,000 autistic people were economically inactive often because of employers’ practices which could easily be amended to make it easier for people with the condition to demonstrate their skills and abilities.

A spokesperson for Ms Badenoch said it would be “wrong to infer any prejudice” from the report and added: “It is essential that we are able to talk about these issues without the media deliberately misleading their readers for the sake of easy headlines”.

“If we are to resolve the problem of deteriorating mental health, we must be able to point out that it is happening and how society has changed its approach to it and determine whether that approach is working,”

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