Motability to give black box monitors to under 30s

Podcast transcript for episode published on 1 April 2026 

EMMA - Hello, Emma here, and later in this episode.

[Clip]

ELLE - They picked up a bunch of toothpicks and they emptied them out and they said, can you take one look at these and then can you count them? And then they like covered the toothpicks with their hands. Of course, it is a reference to Rain Man where he is able to count.

EMMA - And how did you feel in that moment?

ELLE - I just felt really embarrassed. I just felt like it was all a joke. Like they just thought, I mean, they really, like so many people have this very narrow view of what being autistic is.

[End of Clip]

EMMA - Elle McNicoll will be here to tell us about her new adult rom-com and my emotional support journalist this time is Beth Rose. Hi Beth.

BETH - Hi Emma.

EMMA - Beth listen to this and tell me what it is.

[Clip]

Three, two, one, complete.

[End of Clip]

EMMA - Hands over your ears.

BETH - Oh my goodness. Is that a rocket launching Emma? What is that?

EMMA - It's not quite a rocket launcher.

[Clip]

Fire temperature high.

[End of Clip]

EMMA - Fryer temperature high. It's my new air fryer, Bethany!

BETH - No, that cannot be an air fryer, Emma. That sounds like you're evacuating an entire building. Why is it so loud?

EMMA - I do not really understand why they didn't include a volume button. My only thought is that it is aimed at a very specific group of people who maybe have hearing and sight loss, or people who are older. It's gamified the whole thing. If I'm over at the fridge and it starts counting down from 10 seconds, I will, like, try and be really quick putting the stuff in the fridge, or if I'm getting the cutlery out, I'll start firing it round the table so that I can be back at the air fryer before that cracker's alarm goes off.

BETH – It's very dramatic for an air fryer, Emma, for what you're using it for.

EMMA - My nervous system is a bit shot, I'll be honest. I've only had it for a week.

MUSIC – Theme music.

EMMA - Hello, I'm Emma Tracy and this is Access All, the BBC's disability and mental health podcast. You can subscribe to us in the UK on BBC sounds or for the rest of the world, it's wherever you get your podcasts from. Contact me, you can email accessall@bbc.co.uk.

Later in this episode, neurodivergent author Elle McNicoll will be with me to chat about her new rom-com for adults. And I've got BBC journalist Beth Rose with me to talk through some of the other disability stories from the past month.

But first, Motability customers are being drip fed some big changes coming to them in the next few months. Black boxes will be added to all vehicles with a driver under the age of 30. Those drivers will be scored weekly, not being smooth enough, could see them kicked off the scheme. There's been a change to the mileage cap too. Drivers can now do up to 10,000 miles per year and that's half the previous amount. Any excess mileage driven over and above that was charged at 5p per mile and now will be charged at 25p per mile and that's a 400 per cent rise there.

Motability is where people forgo some of their disability benefits to lease a vehicle. The government took away 12 per cent tax breaks on insurance on the scheme at the last budget, which Motability now has to cover.

Disabled people have been getting in touch with Access All, perplexed, annoyed, and worried about these changes. We'll have the Motability Foundation CEO, Nigel Fletcher, to talk to me in a moment.

But first, I've got two young people affected by lots of these changes. We've got Keron Day, he's 25, he's an actor, and you might know him from Sex Education. He's about to get a black box fitted to his new wheelchair accessible van. And we've got Eva Hanna from Northern Ireland, where they've been trialling the black box since last September. Eva's 21 and she's been using it. Hi both.

KERON – Hello, good morning.

EVA - Hiya.

EMMA - Lovely to have you both with me.

Now Keron, you're due to be one of the first Motability drivers in England to have a black box fitted to your wheelchair accessible van. Insurers do offer these black box systems to drivers generally between the ages of 16 and 24 in return to lower insurance premiums, so they're not unusual. Is it a big deal?

KERON - Of course it's a big deal. I'll pick you up on two things.

First of all, for us, for disabled people, the age limit is 30, not 24 as you just said, so there's an enormous difference between non-disabled people and disabled people. If I passed at 17, I would have 13 years of mandatory black box. None of my non-disabled peers would have that.

But again, I would stress, and I'm going to keep stressing this, non-disabled people have the choice. And for someone like me, who needs a wheelchair accessible vehicle, I can't just source an alternative easily that's adapted to me, which is why the Motability scheme exists, and why the Motability scheme has been such a success because it's helped people like me, the independence and the freedom that it was intended to do.

EMMA - But this is a small price to pay then. Motability are under a lot of pressure. They've had these tax breaks taken away. They're saying the scheme is going to be more expensive unless they make changes like this one.

KERON - I totally understand the financial issues. But again, there's no choice here. It's like they've said you can have a black box where your insurance is paid for or you can contribute to the insurance instead and not have a black box. That isn't an option that we have. It is harder for our community to perhaps cover the costs of that insurance but again we haven't got that choice and that's the issue with this.

EMMA - And are you actually worried about your scores? You know, the black box is attached to your vehicle. There's an app that connects it with your phone. It measures things like speed and smoothness and phone use. Are you worried about that for you?

KERON - I worry about the adaptions on the vehicle. So we are being punished for the way we drive, not because we are driving badly, but because the technology they are putting on our vehicles is not compatible with the way that we drive. We all have to pass the exact same driving tests that everybody else does. So it's not a safety. It's not a point about our safety to drive. It's a point about the technology not understanding the way we drive.

EMMA - I'll move on to Eva, been waiting patiently there, Eva. Thank you. You've had a black box for a few months. You're 21. You're in Northern Ireland. Tell me first about your driving setup.

EVA - I'm a wheelchair user so I have adapted hand controls and then obviously yeah I had the black box fitted in September and again didn't have any choice it was just you're gonna have this is what you're getting and I'm not totally against having a black box because I am 21 I probably if I wasn't using the Mobility scheme I might have already been using had an insurance company that was making me use a black box anyway.

My problem is more with the actual app and how it works, like Keron was saying. There's a bit of a weirdness going on with the way it works with hand controls or if you have adaptions in your car. There's just a few things that maybe need to be tweaked.

EMMA - So what's the weirdness that you've noticed?

EVA - The big thing for me is the smoothness with the hand controls. The brakes can be bit more sensitive, the braking and acceleration, obviously it's not the same as using your feet. So sometimes with the hand controls, they can be a bit heavier, you have to pull on the brake a little or you have to pull on the accelerator a little bit more to get it going. And my car's new as well. So the brakes are really sensitive. And I've noticed that even when I'm just stopping at a junction, it'll say that I've braked really hard or if I'm pulling off, it'll say that I've pulled off really hard.

EMMA - And it's a traffic like system, isn't it? So you know, you can see whether it's red, orange or green and your dad drives your car doesn't he with the regular controls. Tell me the difference between your scores and your dad's scores. We're not we're not talking about your dad's driving here we're not gonna you know pull him up on that but what's the difference that you found?

EVA - I find that whenever you know we can be doing the same route and whenever he drives he his smoothness is always 100 per cent and you know I know I'm not a dangerous driver I'm not breaking harshly or anything like that but there is a difference whenever I drive. I'll always get knocked down a bit on the smoothness.

EMMA - So what score are you currently getting generally?

EVA - Most of the time it's green because I'm not speeding and I'm not over the usage. The only thing that takes me down is the smoothness. A lot of the time it will be like amber and then yesterday actually I was out and I got red for the smoothness because I just had to stop because there was another car and like on my roads I drive on country roads.

EMMA - Yeah, so you had to do a quick stop, an unexpected quick stop and it sent you into red. I mean too many reds for that and you might be off the scheme. How did you feel about that?

EVA - Obviously it's a worry because the scheme is so great for people like me that really rely on it. If I had to go and get buy my own car and then get the adaptions put onto that, that's like really, really expensive. It just works so great and so for people to be kicked off just because of like small things that aren't their fault, it would be such a big let down to a lot of disabled people.

EMMA - Did you get the email the other day about the new changes coming in?

EVA - I did.

EMMA - Right, yeah. So like mileage cap, so 10,000 miles per year, it used to be 20,000, but also the excess mileage, 25p per mile. And then in terms of the black box, going back to that, you can only drive for an hour at a time, which is the recommendation, doesn't get you kicked off the scheme. But you also have to take a break and you can have five or six journeys per day. That's their recommendation there as well. How do you feel about all that? How did that impact you?

EVA - It's not helpful for disabled people because I know I'm driving into work and that takes me sometimes over an hour depending on traffic. That's somewhere that I need to go. Just like an able-bodied person would be driving, someone who's not on the scheme, they're driving to work, they don't get penalised for that. The not having to make certain amount of trips during the day. Some disabled people need to make trips, you know, someone might be able to just walk to the shop, but disabled people, they might have to drive, they might be going multiple places, going to a shop, going to pick up medication, going to the GP, and so that's more places that they have to go. So I think that they could be unintentionally penalising people on the scheme for something that they need.

EMMA - I'm joined now by Nigel Fletcher, the CEO of the Motability Foundation, which is the charity arm of the scheme. Hi, Nigel.

NIGEL - Hi, Emma.

EMMA - Why are you doing this?

NIGEL - Some of that is because of, as you've referenced, the additional tax that Motability customers are now going to have to pay from the 1st of July, £300 million in total from the 1st of July onwards. And that's a tax that disabled people really can't afford. So, a lot of the changes that we're trying to implement now are all about accommodating that tax in a way that means that the cost really doesn't pass on in full to customers. That tax will equate to something like £1,100 per customer if it was just passed on in price, just like you would normally on VAT. VAT now applies to advance and additional payments on the scheme from the 1st of July onwards. That £1,100 that I mentioned is actually across both VAT and IPT, which is insurance premium tax and so yes we are we are trying to absorb it as much as we possibly can because people's pockets aren't that deep to be honest.

EMMA - Tell me about the black boxes they are going to be mandatory for new leases for April if there's anybody driving the car under 30 if you're non-disabled you're offered a black box by some insurers when you're under 24 why the difference are disabled people less safe?

NIGEL - Well I think the really important thing to realise about the scheme is that it's a shared insurance model and what that really means is that regardless of anything, you will get insurance on the scheme. So you'll probably know that with lots of insurance companies, once you've given your address, once you've potentially declared a condition or disability to the DVLA, all of those things can increase your insurance costs. But with the Motability scheme, we really believe that that's not okay, that everyone should have access to the scheme regardless of where you live or the disability or condition that you have. So it's a shared insurance model and the cost of that insurance has gone up by over 60 per cent since 2022. We have looked at where the risk sits across all of Motability customers who has more accidents and who is less safe driving and young drivers certainly come out as higher risk for us and so we started there. The less accidents there are, the less incidents there are on the road, the cheaper the insurance is for us and therefore, the cheaper leases are for customers.

EMMA - Eva said that her hand controls are actually impacting on her scores in terms of smoothness.

NIGEL - We're currently in a pilot stage. We're currently gradually increasing the number of people using a black box on the scheme. As I said, we started back in September, and we're very much listening to feedback at the moment. In terms of how this develops going forward, we'd really like to get the number of people using a black box up to around 15 per cent of the scheme. And as a foundation we've said that once we've got to 15,000 we can then look at the data, look at the policy, understand what people are experiencing and then make some decisions going forward from there.

It's interesting to hear about the hand controls, I haven't heard of that before, so we'll look into that one.

EMMA - Have you got research? Do you know how many people are likely to actually be struck off the scheme after they get too many red scores?

NIGEL - We have done research and we've got data coming in already Emma, I can tell you that just over 300 people 300 drivers have been removed from the scheme because of Drive Smart and we look at those very very carefully and certainly as a foundation you can understand that it's really really important that we understand those situations.

One example for instance is an individual that was driving 117 miles an hour in a 30 mile an hour zone who removed from the scheme you know that that is a serious safety issue not just for individual but everyone else in that community.

EMMA - The mileage cap so for everybody who's not in a wheelchair accessible van that's gone down from 20 000 miles to 10 000 miles but also the money that you pay if you drive any miles above that cap has gone up from 5p a mile to 25p a mile that feels like a really big difference.

NIGEL - For some people that would mean a reduction in independence and it's worrying for us, it's worrying for customers. As I said we've had to make some really difficult decisions on the scheme on how to accommodate the tax. The mileage change that we're implementing and we've agreed to implement is directly related to that tax change. The average mileage on the scheme at the moment, if I just look at the average customer, they're currently doing seven and a half thousand miles a year.

EMMA - How do you feel about these changes as the CEO of the Motability Foundation?

NIGEL - Mobility is becoming more expensive. I think the transport equity gap already stands at 25 per cent, which means that disabled people travel 25 per cent less than non-disabled people. As a disabled person myself, I feel bad about that. That's our whole mission as the Motability Foundation to close that transport equity gap, and we do that in many different ways outside of the Motability scheme as well.

The additional taxes that are being applied to the Motability scheme means that the scheme, which is very successful, it's helped millions of people over the years, over the last 50 years, to close that transport equity gap, But that scheme is going to become less generous and we've had to make some incredibly difficult decisions that I and my board of trustees really don't feel comfortable with.

EMMA - Nigel Fletcher, CEO of Motability Foundation, the charity part of the Motability scheme, thank you for joining me on Access All.

NIGEL - Thank you, Emma.

EMMA - Thanks to Eva Hanna and to Keron Day as well.

Have you got something to say about recent changes to Motability? Get in touch. Tell me about it. It's accessall@bbc.co.uk.

MUSIC

EMMA - Beth Rose is here. Beth is a journalist, works with me in BBC News, reporting on all things disability. We work together a lot, don't we?

BETH - We do. Normally I'm on the other side of the glass, Emma. It's nice to be in your seat in London.

EMMA - It's really nice to have you on this side of the glass. It's nice to chat through some of the stories we've been working really hard on this month.

Now, do some things take you ages where other people just fly through them? Let's take, for example, preparing to go to a gig or on holiday. This has a name actually, it's called the accessibility time tax. Four thousand disabled people filled out a survey for a Scottish charity called Euan's Guide. And one of the questions on that survey was about this. What have other people said?

BETH - Well, a lot of people have been saying how frustrated they are with the amount of time they put into simple things like booking assistance for trains, checking restaurants are accessible, getting a companion ticket for gigs or theatre. Eighty-eight per cent of these people were disabled. So lots of supporters, friends, family, they're also struggling with gthis time tax, 54 per cent of people felt excluded or left behind as a result of all that extra work. And actually, 47 per cent of people often chose to give up or miss out on something simply because that time tax wasn't worth it in the end, they got frustrated, they got stuck on the websites, or they couldn't get the answer they want. And so they just gave up.

EMMA - I went to a huge retail website recently, and tried to do that thing where you try and buy jeans. Oh my gosh, jeans shopping.

BETH - It's a nightmare anyway.

EMMA - Oh, nightmare. So I couldn't check out the basket. I spent an hour and 20 minutes trying to check these jeans out and I still don't have a pair of jeans.

BETH - And did you feel your stress and anxiety rising at this point?

EMMA - I can feel it rising now…weeks later…

BETH - So 80 per cent of people have said that it massively increased their stress and anxiety.

But they also came up with a solution in the survey. It's potentially the most simple solution ever. Eighty-five per cent of people said they just want clear and accurate information, and that would reduce their stress, it would reduce their time, and they just get out and about more.

EMMA - I'm gonna call it the disability time tax, and I think the accessibility time tax is within that. I'm changing the rules here, Bethany. But I think that, email me, tell me, what is the time tax, what does it mean to you, and what's your solution? accessall@bbc.co.uk.

Let's discuss pay gaps.

I mean there's been a lot of talk about male-female pay gaps over the years, but now the government plans to get businesses with more than 250 employees to report their disability pay gaps. That sounds like a good news story. Maybe it will reduce those pay gaps, Beth?

BETH - Well it's certainly what the people have asked for, Emma, because the government did a consultation about pay gaps and 87 per cent of respondents said yes, please do track disability pay gaps and ethnicity pay gaps as well. Just so we know what they are, a pay gap is the difference in hourly earnings between a disabled worker and a non-disabled worker, and it can be quite a chunk of money. So in 2023 the Office for National Statistics said there was about a 12.7 per cent difference. And then in 2024, the Trades Union Congress, which we normally know as the TUC, found it to be a 15.5 per cent difference. That's about £2.24 an hour, amounting to almost £4,000 a year. So quite a big difference. And have you ever heard of the disability pay gap day?

EMMA - I have. I've seen it on social media over the years.

BETH - So in 2024, it was the 7th of November when disabled people effectively stopped being paid for their work and non-disabled people continued to be paid. Lots of organisations have been calling for this for a long time, as have the workers. Charities including Scope and People Like Us, as well as more corporate outfits like the Institute of Directors, really really really want to highlight this gap. They say it should be called out and addressed making pay much more transparent and it would be a whole lot easier. However, interestingly, the Business Disability Forum, which works with employers to make things better for disabled staff, isn't so sure about this plan.

EMMA - That's right. And I spoke earlier to Angela Matthews, the Director of Public Policy and Research, and I first asked her why they're not so keen on the idea.

[Clip]

ANGELA - Yeah, so it's not so much that we're not keen, but we don't think it's a solution in itself, it doesn't account for how different disabled individuals need a different type of work. Think of someone with a learning disability or a mental health condition who rely on employers' initiatives such as employment support schemes to get into work. And what we see actually is an increasing number of employers telling us that the more they do these employment support schemes, the wider their disability pay gap is, because typically those first jobs are the lowest paid in the organisation. So what we see is quite a wide pay gap in organisations where there are disabled people, even at the top. So we have started to see employers say, does the government want us to do these schemes less then? I also hear that people who have progressing conditions, so I spoke to a senior manager who had had a stroke, and they wanted to reduce the hours and the seniority of their role so that they could manage their life and work.

EMMA – So companies are unwilling to do that for them because of their pay gap reporting?

ANGELA - Yes, we are contacted quite a lot increasingly over the last couple of weeks to say, how can we resolve this? And that's what BDF are interested in doing, we want to make it work and we don't want it to backfire for disabled people.

[End of Clip]

EMMA - Listeners, give me your take, email accessall@bbc.co.uk.

Beth, there have been benefits changes announced a long time ago but they're going to come on April 6th and they're around a universal credit.

BETH - Exactly, so April is obviously the start of the new financial year so when things change they tend to happen around now, obviously this year is Easter as well. There was a big political tussle last summer where the government had to effectively take a U-turn on their plans to radically change PIP.

Now, as you've just said, we've got the Timms Review, which is going to look at PIP. So those changes didn't happen in the end, but there were some changes that went through last summer that might've kind of got lost in a lot of the chatter going on around PIP. And this is to do with the universal credit health top-up for new applicants. Basically that is being halved for new applicants. So you might also know this as the Limited Capability for Work and Work-related Activity, or the LCWRA. It's a really long acronym.

Essentially, it's for people who cannot work, who no longer need to work, and it's agreed that they don't need to take part in any activities to help get them into work. Current recipients will be receiving £429.80 per month from the 6th of April. Anyone who applies for it from the 6th of April will only get half that amount. So that will now be £217.26. This change, they hope, will make a saving of about £1 billion by the time we hit 2030.

EMMA - What's the other side of it and who is it going to impact most?

BETH - In terms of who it's going to impact, we don't really know at the moment because this benefit you tend to apply for at a point when your health deteriorates so much that you cannot work. So for a lot of people, they might be getting more and more unwell, but they don't see this coming for them for a long time so they just don't know about it. There's not been much information in the press and there's something called the severe conditions criteria which means if your assessed is having a severe disability or condition that isn't going to get better that cannot be treated or you have 12 months or less to live you will continue to get that higher rate.

The problem is we don't yet know who or what meets this criteria.

EMMA - So what meets this severe disability that won't get better criteria

BETH - Yeah we're not we don't know the ins and outs yet that is due to come out very soon in April so hopefully we'll know our programme has come out on the 2nd of April you've got until the 5th of April to apply for the health top-up on the old rate if it's something that is happening to you right now you can get your application in there are a few other caveats you have to be 16 to apply and also you have to have finished your education before you can apply as well so this is going to impact a lot of younger people…

EMMA - …your standard education…like school and college

BETH - …exactly, yeah.

EMMA - Beth Rose, thank you so much for running me through some of the month's disability stories.

BETH - You're welcome.

MUSIC

EMMA - My guest Elle McNicoll is a best-selling novelist and screenwriter. Her children's debut, A Kind of Spark, won tonnes of awards, was turned into a TV show and broadcast all around the world.

And now she's written a book for adults. Unapologetic love story is a rom-com and it's about a disability podcast host. I feel so seen, Elle McNicoll. Hello.

ELLE - Thank you. Yeah, I'm in a very appropriate setting for the book today.

EMMA - Yeah. Where'd you get the idea for that from?

ELLE - I needed her to have a job where she could just talk to and about disabled people. A podcaster felt like a great, a great fun choice.

EMMA - Definitely. Now underpinning all of this and the reason why you get to be on this disability podcast, is that you're neurodivergent, you're autistic, and that feeds into all of your writing, really. Tell us a bit about Unapologetic Love Story.

ELLE - Well, it's a love story about, as we say, a neurodivergent podcaster. Her star is on the rise, and she enters into a sort of high society, where she meets this journalist who is her complete opposite. He's deeply cynical, he's deeply jaded. He is known kind of around places like the BBC and Channel 4. He's around as the king of cancel culture because he really holds people to account and is quite scary. And they meet at a very fancy party and he decides that he's going to write a piece on her.

I noticed when I was doing a lot of press a few years ago for the television show, when I was talking to the non-disabled press, they all kept calling me unapologetic. They would say, Oh, you know, she wants to see more autistic characters in fiction and she's unapologetic about that. I just kept thinking, why should I apologise for that? It felt quite loaded. So it was fun for me to call it Unapologetic Love Story because she is unapologetic.

EMMA - And is that why you wrote this book? Because of people saying things you like unapologetic?

ELLE - I mean, in part, I am a hopeless romantic. I do love love. I love love stories and have since I was a gangly teenager. So it is a love of the genre. But it was just some very surreal experiences, especially with like American press and just realising there were still a tonne of hangups about disabled adults and disabled women and how desexualized and dehumanised they can be. And I did one interview with someone in America over zoom and my fiancé came in the back of the shot at one point just to put like a mug of tea down or something and the women screamed and she was like, wait, you don't live alone?" And I was like, no, no, no, I live with my fiancé. And she was like, fiancé, you have a, you're in a relationship. And she was just, she was so surprised. And I just, I just thought, oh gosh.

EMMA - Why do you always have an autistic lead character or two?

ELLE - I really do feel if I didn't label them as such, and if I didn't write them from my own brain, they would get labelled that anyway, because people would read them and go, this is, these people are a little bit different. I really want to assure people as well. I'm always like, look, these are not sad, depressing stories. This is not a lesson. I'm not trying to hit anyone over the head with a medical textbook or teach them anything. It's just a different slice of being human. And I think that's what books are supposed to be. I think a book is the closest thing to a human being as you can get. And therefore every book is sort of a window or a door where you get to look into someone else's world. And that's all this is. It's just a slightly historically underrepresented door for me to look behind and I promise it will be worth it. I just like writing about neurodivergent people because I'm in my head 24-7, I've been diagnosed a long time, like that's just where I live.

EMMA - What makes a book with a neurodivergent character better or different?

ELLE - The case of Unapologetic Love Story, I think falling in love when you're autistic looks very different because I don't, I'm putting myself in this situation and not speaking for other people, but I don't read into cues that aren't there. So when someone doesn't call you back, I just think, well, they're not going to call you back. And I don't read it. And so, and I think that's where some of the comedy is in Unapologetic Love Story is that Tom is sort of so confused by Raina's different approach to life and how she doesn't read into things because she doesn't expect there to be all these hidden meanings.

EMMA - When you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. You even say it in your book. How do you go about deciding which traits or how her autistic experience looks?

ELLE - It's difficult because everyone is so different. And I think the gaps between each autistic person are really wide. And you know my, the portrayals that I use, for example, I always stay very much in my lane. It's autism without a diagnosis of a learning disability. That's very clear. So it's someone who's high masking, who's verbal. I don't start making things up because I think therein lies danger. So I just use things from life and it's really exposing. Those parts feel a little bit like your diary has been photocopied and sort of scattered all over the corridors.

But what's been so nice is that because it's coming out soon, loads of people have already read it and they've read, you know, advance copies, and have got in touch. And it's been beautiful to read from people who really relate to a very specific take on autism. But it's been really affirming and it's made me feel, as every book does, a little bit less alone, which is nice.

EMMA - And what were the big neurodivergent things you wanted to get in there? I mean, you started strong with the school talk.

ELLE - Yeah, so the opening chapter of Unapologetic Love Story is a private school in Kensington who have booked a couple of speakers for World Autism Day. They've booked someone from a charity who doesn't actually know a lot about autism and doesn't really care much about autism. And then they've booked an autistic adult to come in and talk about their experience. And they're sort of shocked and horrified when the autistic adult shows up in fluffy pink cowgirl boots and a lot of makeup and long legs and a mini skirt. And they think this is not what we pictured at all. And I think that opening chapter was so important to me, not just to channel some of the fun school visits I've been able to do in my job, but also because that first chapter I think is really holding some people's hands through the book and going, this isn't the stereotypes of autism that you may have seen before. This is how it can look for some adult autistic women. This other character is talking on and on about how autistic people can't be in relationships and they can't have empathy and they can't hold down jobs. All the things that I was told as a young adult, and Raina the main character of course then stands up and says, that is not necessarily true.

EMMA - There was a moment in the book around toothpicks. And that was the only part of the book where I was like, oh, that didn't happen to someone, did it? And then I found out it really happened to you. Can you explain the bit in the book and how it happened to you?

ELLE - About 10 years ago, I was going out with someone who's a little bit of a big deal. And I can't say who they were. But we were at one of their after parties. And I was very sort of private about being neurodivergent in those days. This was before I was an author. So I didn't talk about it, you know, never talked about it at work. And I only talked about it with this person because we were talking about creativity. And I said, I happen to think that for me being autistic is I'm quite creative. I'm not one of the sort of science and maths autistics. I'm a creative one. And he found that really interesting. And he thought, oh, maybe maybe he was a bit ADHD or something. And then he brought it up at a party later that night with all these people I didn't know, a lot of whom were quite drunk. And this was like 2014. So this was before we were having these big conversations about neurodiversity in the public sphere. And one of the people at the party just found it so laughable when he said, Oh, Elle's autistic. And they picked up a bunch of toothpicks and they emptied them out. And they said, can you take one look at these and then can you count them? And then they like covered the toothpicks with their hands. Of course, it is a reference to Rain Man where he is able to count.

EMMA - And how did you feel in that moment?

ELLE - I just felt really embarrassed. I just felt like it was all a joke. Like they just thought, I mean, they really like so many people have this very narrow view of what being autistic is and if it doesn't look like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, does it really matter? Is it even worth talking about? And sure enough, she shut me up for a few years. I didn't talk about it again for a while. I was writing the book. I did. And exactly as you I said, if I put this in, people aren't going to believe it. But I said, I'm going to do it anyway, because I owe it to my 21-year-old self to put it in. And in the acknowledgments of the book, I thank that person. I say thank you for, thank you for throwing those toothpicks on the table because you reminded me I have teeth.

EMMA - I love that.

You said on Instagram, you were talking to prospective authors, and you said writing autistic people into your books, I'm paraphrasing, will save someone's life. Did that relate to the impact your books have had and the things people have come to you with?

ELLE - It sounds really arrogant when it's read back to me, but I mean that in general. When you write about any disability, because of the way that disability is perceived, I think still in the wider public, you either have to be an inspirational athlete that is winning every medal at the Paralympics, or you are somebody that needs a lot of help and has a lot of vulnerability, if you occupy that middle space, I think it's people get quite uncomfortable. So I always say if you write about that experience, and you try and humanise it, and you try and normalise it, and you say, look, it's not, I'm not asking for a free ride. I'm not asking for anything except for people just to maybe empathise and understand a little bit. And honestly, it does save people's lives. I have not, I've been writing since 2020, and I haven't had one day where I haven't had a message from someone saying, this book has really, really helped me. And sometimes it is a case of people saying, oh, I'm alive because of this book.

EMMA - And what do they mean? What do they mean by that?

ELLE - I think they mean that they were close to doing enormous self-harm. And then the book made them rethink their relationship with something they've been told to hate or something they've been told not to trust, and it gave them a sort of strength to keep going, which sounds really, I mean to some people that will sound laughable. They'll be like, a book can make you not, but I know as an autistic person how, I know the ugly parts, I know how difficult it can be sometimes to constantly feel like an alien. And so sometimes just knowing that there is community, that there is understanding, even if it comes through a book instead of a person. But again, like I said, a book is the closest thing to a person. So to some readers, those books are like friends, those books are like people in their lives.

EMMA - And do you know that because you were that reader?

ELLE - Yeah, books were my, I mean stories in general, not just books but films, stories, they were my lifeline as a young adult. I used them to process the world, I understood the world because of stories, not because of people around me. So I know the importance and that's why, although it might sound hyperbolic, that's why I know that the stories can really, really help people.

EMMA - Unapologetic Love Story is out on the 2nd of April, which is World Autism Day. Thank you so much, Elle McNicoll.

ELLE - Thank you.

EMMA - That is it for this episode of Access All. Thank you for being with me.

You can email me about anything you've heard on this episode, accessall@bbc.co.uk.

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I'll see you next time. Bye!