Some parents in Wales are having to wait longer than seven years to have their children diagnosed with autism, BBC Wales has learned.

A leading charity says almost half wait more than three years for diagnosis, compared to one-third in England.

The Welsh government says work is under way to improve the diagnosis of children and adults.

It commissioned a report which found a “lack of consistency of services (postcode lottery)”.

The report, commissioned 18 months ago, sought the views of clinicians.

It also found a lack of understanding by senior management of the time and resources needed for diagnosis and “a lack of ring-fenced resources for ASD (autism spectrum disorder), lack of commissioning and waiting lists”.

The Welsh government claims to have a “world-leading” autism strategy, launched in 2008, and has ring-fenced £7.4m to support it.

One in every 100 children is born with ASD, a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people communicate and relate to others. It also affects how they make sense of the world around them.

The National Autism Society Wales says 47% of parents in Wales wait longer than three years for a diagnosis, compared with 34% in England.

The charity’s head of external relations, Neil Ingham, told BBC Wales’ Dragon’s Eye programme: “We know that with the right support and intervention a child can have chance to thrive and develop and reach full potential, but if it’s not good enough you’re going to fall short of giving that child the best start in life and incur bigger cost in the long term in terms of mental health and employment and range of services older person will need.”

Lisa Phillips, who waited two years to have a diagnosis for her child, has set up an online support group for parents.

“I’ve heard a lot that we have a world-leading autism strategy, and that sounds fantastic… how lucky we must be,” she said.

“That’s all very well, but we’re not seeing the benefit in Pembrokeshire. If Pembrokeshire is world-leading then I dread to think what the rest of the world must be like, because we are floundering.

“Parents are desperate. I’ve been in contact with one mum who had to drop her working hours from 30 hours to seven because her child needs constant watching as she is suicidal… a child is suicidal.”

In a statement, Deputy Social Services and Children’s Minister Gwenda Thomas said: “I fully recognise the importance to parents and children of receiving a timely diagnosis.

“Diagnosing ASD is complex, involving multi-agency, speciality assessments and this can take time.

“Work is ongoing to improve diagnosis in children and adults, while ensuring greater consistency in its application throughout Wales.”

She added that accessing services did not always depend on completing a formal diagnosis “and I expect professionals to ensure families receive appropriate support at the right time”.

Conservative AM Mark Isherwood, the chair of the assembly’s cross-party group on autism, said there were questions to be asked about whether the strategy was “actually doing what it was supposed to: to produce better outcomes to children and adults on the spectrum, rather than simply being a document to boast about because ‘we’re the first in the world'”.

The number of disability hate crimes reported to police has reached a record high, sparking concerns that the Coalition’s “anti-scrounger” rhetoric is fuelling hostility to the most vulnerable members of society. A total of 1,942 disability hate crimes were recorded by police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland last year.

That figure, based on Freedom of Information answers supplied by 43 of 44 forces, represents a 14 per cent rise on 2010. Disability hate crime has doubled since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Despite the rise, the number of people convicted for the crime actually fell last year. Only 523 people were found guilty of a disability hate crime in 2011, The Independent has discovered, down 5 per cent from 2010. It suggests that barely one in four reported crimes leads to a conviction – a ratio that got worse last year.

Charities expressed grave concern at the rise in reported incidents. Guy Parckar, head of policy and campaigns at Leonard Cheshire Disability, said: “The impact of hate crime simply cannot be overestimated, and these figures suggest that police authorities and local and central government must all look again at what they are doing to tackle disability hate crime.”

While the Association of Chief Police Officers says the rise in cases can be explained in part by efforts to encourage more victims to come forward, many disability groups fear the figures reflect society’s growing antipathy towards the disabled community.

“There are historical parallels,” warns Katharine Quarmby, the author of Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, who has grown alarmed by the levels of “benefit scrounger” abuse aimed at disabled people. “If you have a group that is blamed for economic downturn, terrible things can happen to them.”

Last year the Glasgow Media Trust found the public believed between 50 and 70 per cent of those on disability benefits were fraudulent. The actual number is likely to be between 1 and 2 per cent. The same report found that there has been a tripling in the use of words such as “scrounger”, “cheat” and “skiver” in tabloid stories on disability in the past five years.

“Iain Duncan Smith [the Work and Pensions Secretary] is saying ‘We’re going to push through these benefit reforms’ and hinting strongly that lots of people on disability benefits are scroungers,” Quarmby says. “That kind of rhetoric leads to disability hate crime on the streets.”

Disability charities receive a constant flow of reports about incidents that are never reported to police – from families who have been forced out of their homes by relentless targeting, to disabled teenagers who avoid groups of strangers for fear of what might be said to them.

Campaigners fear that disability hate crime prosecutions are being undermined because of a perception in the criminal justice system that evidence given by mentally disabled people is unreliable.

Jo Davies from Mencap said: “If someone with a learning disability is on a witness stand being pressed for certain details, they may end up being confused by the cross-examination. And then different elements of the case can fall apart.”

Mencap calls for more support for disabled witnesses, such as better pre-trial preparation and more opportunities to give evidence via video link.

The British Medical Journal has called on doctors’ organisations to stop opposing assisted dying for terminally ill, mentally competent adults.

In an editorial the BMJ said it wanted the British Medical Association and royal colleges to move their position from opposition to neutrality.

Fiona Godlee, BMJ editor-in-chief, argued that “legalisation is a decision for society not doctors” and drew parallels with abortion legalisation in the 1960s which was initially opposed by medical bodies.

She said: “A change in the law, with all the necessary safeguards, is an almost inevitable consequence of the societal move towards greater individual autonomy and patient choice. But it may take a while, and it may not happen until we properly value death as one of life’s central events and learn to see bad deaths in the same damning light as botched abortions.”

The BMJ said it backed calls from the campaign group Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD) which wanted medical bodies to be neutral on the issue.

Iona Heath, president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, wrote in the BMJ last month that the “apparently burgeoning enthusiasm” for assisted dying seemed surprising given recent history. This included “the involvement of doctors in state sponsored killings, personified by Josef Mengele, and the devastating private enterprise of Harold Shipman”.

She said it would be impossible to draft a law robust enough to protect the sick and disabled, adding: “A malign government coming into power with legislation supporting assisted dying already in place is a deeply disturbing prospect. As individuals, very few of us act always in the interests of others and, because of this very basic truth, the legalisation of assisted dying, despite the very best of intentions, may render the most vulnerable even more so.”

A BMA spokesperson said the organisation was “firmly opposed” to the legalisation of assisted dying adding: “If assisted dying was legalised, effective safeguards could not be implemented without the involvement of doctors. It is therefore appropriate for doctors to voice their views on this issue.”

The BMA annual meeting later this month will debate several motions urging neutrality on the issue of assisted dying.

Learning disabled people do not have sex, so John Tattersall was told when he rang a medical centre in West Yorkshire to ask for contraception information for young people with special needs.

Tattersall, 47, who has a mild learning disability, was unsurprised by the statement which he heard two years ago when co-ordinating a sexuality project run by Leeds University and human rights charity Change.

“I’d like this prejudice to go away,” says Tattersall, recalling that at his special school, teachers explained what sex was, “but never gave information about contraception”.

Social integration for learning disabled people has improved since the 1960s when Tattersall was growing up, but attitudes towards sex and relationships have not caught up. Vivien Cooper, founder of campaigning family support organisation the Challenging Behaviour Foundation (CBF) explains: “It’s difficult for families to access good information and resources – our experience is that it’s not routinely offered and that it’s postcode lottery as to whether it’s good support or not.”

The view that sex education is patchy – regardless of if pupils are at mainstream or special school – is reflected in the project report Tattersall worked on, Talking About Sex and Relationships: The Views of Young People with Learning Disabilities.

Ruth Garbutt, research fellow at Leeds University Centre for Disability Studies, recalls: “There was information for teachers but there was very little available for families and young people with learning disabilities. Even when information was available for teachers, teachers often didn’t always know about it and weren’t getting a clear steer from their local education authority.”

Several of the 17 young people who took part in the project thought gay sex was illegal and did not realise that police investigate cases of sexual abuse. Parents and teachers revealed stories of young people being frightened by puberty – including a boy who had plucked out his pubic hair.

Part of the problem, says CBF’s Cooper, is sexuality is a difficult topic generally. Cooper comments on sex education for learning disabled people, especially those with complex needs: “There are a range of issues with regard to capacity and consent to consider, as well as limited communication ability and communication methods – signing, symbols and so on. For individuals with severe learning disabilities, it can be difficult to equip them with understanding about socially acceptable behaviour, including sexual behaviours.” The CBF offers information about difficult sexual behaviour.

So what sex and relationships education is available? One landmark teaching resource, Living Your Life, first produced in 1991, grew from a project led by learning disability expert, the late Ann Craft, at Nottingham University. Last year sexual health charity Brook and Nottingham-based specialist Oak Field School worked on a new edition. The 366-page resource includes worksheets and assessments.

The innovative Josephine Project in Newcastle-upon-Tyne is one interactive project which helps young learning disabled women to explore issues using a life-sized female model made of soft material, complete with reproductive organs and a “feelings bag” for discussing emotions.

Another positive teaching resource was produced by the children’s learning disability nursing team in Leeds in 2009. Puberty and Sexuality for Children and Young People with a Learning Disability was developed in response to several referrals relating to sexualised behaviours in children with learning disabilities. The Family Planning Association also offers specialist projects for learning disabled people.

As Oak Field head teacher Stewart explains, more resources along the lines of this good practice is vital: “Denying access to appropriate education will make [a vulnerable population] even more vulnerable. They need to be taught to value themselves, to know that their bodies are important.”

Leeds’ Garbutt adds that such knowledge is a moral and social investment: “Investing in this now will leave young people with learning disabilities less open to abuse and also reduce the amount of unplanned pregnancies and – in the case of parents whose children are removed from them – reduce the number of looked after children.”

Experts agree that work in this area lacks national consistency. Teaching formats must be tailor-made for learning disabled pupils and more information should be available for parents. Teachers should have more resources and training, links between schools and sexual health professionals should improve and learning disability sex education should have a higher priority on the national curriculum.

In addition, if people are to develop secure and loving relationships, they need more safe places to socialise. Brook chief executive Simon Blake says: “Like all young people, those with learning difficulties need social and practical opportunities for sex and relationship education to be applied: testing and understanding boundaries in personal relationships and experiencing love, romance and intimacy.”

“People with learning disabilities have the same emotions and feelings as we all do,” stresses CBF’s Cooper, “but limited ways of communicating about these. Failing to support the person and their family appropriately can lead to situations where sexualised behaviours develop which are considered challenging – and this can in turn lead to all sorts of exclusions, restrictions and vulnerabilities.”

Tattersall, married for 17 years, says that despite the lack of information at school, his parents supported him to have relationships: “My parents let me have a relationship as long as I was happy – a lot of young people on the Leeds project didn’t have that opportunity.”

Attention seeking on the internet takes many forms, but the people who hoax online forums with tales of sick children are among the most painful, writes Jolyon Jenkins.

Little Charly Johns was a trouper.

She was only six years old and had cancer – but she fought it with determination. She was in and out of hospital as the disease advanced and retreated.

It was tough too for her mother Anna. She joined the Macmillan online cancer forum.

There she found support and help from people who knew exactly what she was going through.

For two years, Anna kept them updated on Charly’s progress.

“On the whole she is doing great,” she wrote. “She is happy, lively, giggly and very easily excitable. She is always the first to laugh at anything and the last to stop. Nobody could look at Charly now and have any idea of the things she has endured these past 14 months.”

But in November last year, Charly lost her fight for life. On the Macmillan forum there was an outpouring of grief. People wrote poems in Charly’s memory. They painted their fingernails pink in accordance with her last wishes – even men.

But it was all a lie. Charly did not exist. Neither did Anna.

The whole thing was a hoax, discovered when the church in Paris where Charly’s funeral was to be held turned out to have no record of her.

The perpetrator, it transpired, was a teenage girl. The pictures of “Charly” were the girl herself when younger.

Many on the Macmillan forum refused to believe it. They had formed close online relationships with Anna. It seemed impossible that a teenager could have had such emotional maturity. Others left the forum in despair.

“These are some very desperate people,” says Jackie Marshall, a member of the Macmillan forum. “People who may not have long to live, who are sharing burdens with complete strangers, because they are not comfortable sharing with families. The forum provides a lifeline.”

It wasn’t the first time Macmillan has been hoaxed, and Macmillan isn’t the only forum to have been affected by impostors.

An American psychiatrist, Marc Feldman, has described it as “Munchausen by internet”, similar to the well-known Munchausen syndrome, in which people fabricate illnesses to gain attention and sympathy.

It’s no exaggeration to say there’s an epidemic of MBI, and one which destroys the trust that underpins the forums.

Sometimes the hoaxes are astonishingly elaborate. “Cara”, on the west coast of America, kept a blog in which she detailed her fight against cancer, as well as HIV, anorexia and heart problems.

She posted pictures of herself in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask and feeding tube, and a video in which she struggled to speak in the face of neurological difficulties.

She became close friends with two women, one of whom, Lauren, had Cara’s name tattooed on her arm. All a lie. Cara was rumbled, and vanished.

Another of those taken in was Kaylin Andres, a fashion designer who kept a blog about her own cancer. They had Skyped, and Kaylin had sent Cara small gifts.

Then at the end of last year she logged on and read Lauren’s account of her discovery of Cara’s deception. “It was just such a bombshell. I remember reading it at work and I couldn’t help but burst into tears,” says Andres.

In recent weeks there are reports that Cara has re-emerged as “Mollie”, a British teenager going through a problematic pregnancy. The hoaxers have a habit of popping up again in new guises.

Pregnancy and childbirth provide a fertile territory for them. There are cases of women purloining each other’s ultrasound pictures to post online, and of insinuating themselves into forums dealing with stillbirth in order to gather anecdotal details which they can then pass off as their own.

Strangest, perhaps, is the case of Rebeccah Beushausen in Chicago, who not only faked a pregnancy, but faked pictures of the newborn baby, using an ultra-realistic doll.

In that case, Rebeccah had ideological motives – as a Christian and anti-abortionist, she wanted to show that it was possible to carry a foetus to term even though it had a severe genetic disorder.

Feldman thinks that in general, MBI is essentially the same as “classic” Munchausen’s but set on a new stage.

In some cases that’s true. I spoke to a woman, “Amy”, who hoaxed forums for years. She posted first as someone with cancer. Then later, even more bizarrely, she posed as a young girl who was being sexually abused. She was befriended by – and deceived – an older woman for six years.

But even before the internet existed, Amy had been faking medical problems. She dated it back to childhood.

“When I was nine and a half, my little sister was born and she had cerebral palsy and I felt abandoned by my mother. So I faked an eye exam so I could get glasses like my sister had.”

Amy is now seeing a therapist and thinks she has kicked the habit for good.

Another woman spoke of feeling unloved by her parents, of being a misfit, of finding that the forums were the only place where felt accepted.

But compared to classic Munchausen’s, hoaxing online is easy. There’s no need to fool medical professionals.

It gives the perpetrator a quick hit of attention, a feeling of being valued, but without really having done anything to deserve it.

Just as online fraudsters dream of easy money, these people crave easy attention. And it is, perhaps, just another form of fraud – emotional, rather than financial fraud. And emotional fraudsters are no easier to deal with.

Police investigating an armed robbery at the home of a disabled man say they are following up new leads after a television appeal.

Noel Martin, 52, and his two carers were threatened at gunpoint by three men at his home in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham in February.

Cash and an engagement ring belonging to his dead wife were stolen.

An appeal on the BBC One Crimewatch programme on Thursday featured a reconstruction and nearby CCTV footage.

Carer kidnapped

Det Con Ian Tomlinson, from West Midlands Police, said: “We got quite a number of calls, some of which I found quite interesting and a lot of significance to the investigation.”

He said officers would be following up the calls throughout the day.

Mr Martin, who has been paralysed below the neck since a racist attack in Germany in 1996, requires 24-hour care.

On 20 February, one of his carers was kidnapped as she returned home from a shift and was forced to drive back to Mr Martin’s house.

The carers were tied up, while he was forced to open a safe.

The three robbers stole about £1,000 in cash, as well as a watch and the engagement ring, before escaping in a silver Honda Civic, which was later found abandoned in Handsworth.

I’m shocked.

Disabled visitors to a Shropshire air show are being warned that the local station does not have wheelchair access, despite a recent £2m refit.

Cosford station reopened in April after a six month rebuilding project.

The organisers of the Cosford air show said they “cannot recommend” the station for disabled people or those who cannot manage steps.

Network Rail said it is not funded to “provide accessibility enhancements” at stations.

It said funding for this comes directly by the Department for Transport through their Access for All scheme.

A spokesman from the Department for Transport said the government would not provide the funding in this case because, under the code of practice, building around disabled access should already be factored into the redevelopment plans.

The reopening of the station was delayed by five weeks after the rail firm said it lacked “some very basic customer facilities”, including a shelter and information screens.

Network Rail said the refurbishment involved demolishing the existing timber platforms and access stairs and replacing them with new platforms, waiting shelters, and lighting.

The platforms are reached by steel staircases, a spokesman said.