May I just begin today by putting on the record, I’m sure, the thanks of all of us to Professor Laura McAllister and to congratulate her on the honour she received in the birthday honours list just a few days ago?

Returning Members may remember in a debate in November 2014 that I shared my consternation at the revelation that I am considered now to be an older person. Perhaps the worst part of that awakening was the discovery that I am married to an older person as well. In fact, he’s so old that he too has a Clash T-shirt; it’s tucked away in his chest of drawers. It pre-dates the house that we moved into nearly 26 years ago by a significant number of years, but sadly there are no leather trousers to be found there—unlike, it sounds like, in Huw Irranca-Davies’s home.

Even older, though, are the shirts that he’s kept from his days as a player with the football and rugby clubs in mid Wales, from childhood through the youth teams and ultimately into adulthood. They’re not famous teams. Even now, there are parts of Wales where potentially elite talent slips through the net because it is difficult to develop elite talent in sparsely populated areas. It’s a 60-mile round trip to the nearest football academy from where my family lives, for example, and no public transport to speak of. Of course, if you’re able to make that trip, that could be followed by a round trip of nearly 200 miles to actually play a match. It’s a challenge for the players and their mam-and-dad taxis for players in somewhere like Bridgend in my region, where they go to Aberystwyth once a year. But for the players and the mam-and-dad taxis in Aberystwyth, those long journeys are weekly and talent gets lost as patience wears thin. If the next Sophie Ingle or the next Gareth Bale is from, let’s say, Cribyn or Llanbryn-mair, are we sure that we’re actually going to get to know about them?

My old man—I’m allowed to call him that now—however, is hooked on sport. He doesn’t just shout at the telly and engage the cat in amazing punditry from his armchair: until recently, he coached the town’s children and youth football teams and every week he joins a bunch of, well, I’m going to call them veterans, just to be kind, to play five-a-side football. He may have a season ticket to the local osteopath as a result of this, and many others who join him, but for him and those older men, this sport is not just about fitness; it’s the stress-busting; it’s the keeping up of long-held male friendships; it’s always the pub after the game; it’s kind of the men’s shed in a knock-off Barcelona strip. And so campaigns like ‘We Wear the Same Shirt’ have helped highlight the value of sport to male mental health in particular, but the principles of it apply also to older people. Public Health Wales have shown that the most sparsely populated counties in Wales are those inhabited by the largest proportion of older people, with isolation leading to loneliness and a decline in mental and physical health.

Now, my husband’s only in his fifties, but between one and three and one in five people over the age of 65 also claim to be hooked on sport. And as we heard from Russell George earlier on, the figures aren’t necessarily convincing on this, and I think there’s still a little bit of work to do on statistics so that we can be absolutely sure what the position actually is. I mean, I thought those figures sounded pretty high when I looked at them, even when you recognise that this includes bowls, swimming, using an exercise machine and golf. But, when you drill down a little further, it’s just 7 per cent of the over-65s who do sport or exercise twice a week, even though 18 per cent of them are members of sports clubs, and I think that’s pretty interesting. Over half of over-65s do no frequent sports or organised exercise, and the pattern sets in long before this with less than half of 55 to 64-year-olds doing any sport. Yet, over a third say that they do participate three times a week. It looks like it’s all or nothing, doesn’t it? Those hooked on it really seem to be hooked on it.

The Swansea half marathon is taking place on 26 June, and, while not everyone is from Wales in that, of course, you’d be surprised to hear how many older people took part in that last year. Out of 3,441 runners, 241 of them were men between the ages of 50 and 60, and 51 men over the age of 60. Forty women over the age of 45 took part too; that’s just under 10 per cent of those taking part being older people. The much lower figure for women participants is where I’m coming to just to finish this, because Sport Wales recognises that the value of sport goes beyond physical activity, and has a special value to women who are at risk of social exclusion. And it also claims that women are very good at responding to appropriate provision.

So, I’ll finish my contribution with this, Cabinet Secretary. I applaud all the work that’s happening on men’s mental health and the policymakers’ work that’s being done on encouraging young girls to take up sport, but how can we help women, and older women, at risk of becoming obese—women like me—overcome the bygone embarrassment of the old school gym and to become hooked on sport in later life, even if that is football?