Given my Welsh children, my Scottish husband and my English father, I’ve learnt to tread in a very inclusive manner around the subject of team sports. However, I think I can safely say that the performance of the Welsh team in France will be an inspiration to many young boys and girls and we need to ensure that this enthusiasm and interest is built upon and doesn’t go to waste. I think we could look at the success of the London Olympics, because certain sports there saw massive increase in participation in the year immediately following the games. Again, it’s important that we should note that, whilst this will dissipate over time, and although it goes back, there’s always an incremental increase that remains and it is worth using that as a lever to build on again and again.

Tennis is a perfect example of how sport harnesses the extra media coverage at certain times of the year, with tennis clubs generally seeing an increase in membership in the weeks immediately following the grass court championships at Wimbledon. More locally, in my particular constituency, events such as Ironman Wales and the Long Course Weekend provide an inspiration for people, and young people especially, to join up. My kids have entered into Ironkids this time and it’s not actually very easy at all. I’m not entirely sure I’d make it through Ironkids let alone Ironman itself.

It is depressing to see that the uptake of exercise remains inextricably linked to socio-economic factors and Joyce Watson touched upon this in some detail. It’s a fact of life that the lower down the socio-economic ladder you are, the harder it is for you to partake in sports. But there are inexpensive and highly effective opportunities that we can take advantage of. Things like parkruns are a very good example of how mass exercise can be done at very little cost. Minister, I’d like to understand what you feel the Welsh Government might be able to do to promote initiatives such as that.

My colleague Suzy Davies touched a little bit on children living in more deprived areas. I think that that is an extremely important area to start with, because, as we all know, whatever we learn in our childhood tends to go forward with us into older age. So, for me to suddenly take up taekwondo or whatever it’s called is highly unlikely and a very scary thought, to be truthful. However, if my 11-year-old were to take it up, that’s the kind of fitness regime that she will get used to and she will, as a 20-year-old, hopefully go to the gym and so on and so forth. So, if we can capture our young people at a very early age, we have a much better chance of being able to increase sport participation.

I think that Russell George touched on the fact that, actually, the amount of time given to sport in primary schools is dropping and dropping quite significantly. If we look at France, which is where the Welsh rugby team—football team; forgive me please, all those football people who love the beautiful game—. Where the Welsh football team currently are, in France, it is four hours per week for a primary school child. In Wales, they are lucky if they get a proper two. In Scandinavian countries, it’s four to five hours per week for sport, with a big emphasis on including everybody within the school in a sports activity at the weekend.

This does really hurt young people who live in rural communities where poverty can be very easily hidden. If you’re in a household that doesn’t have a great income and you only have one car and that one car is out working with one of the parents, you can only get the school bus into school and back out again; you don’t have the opportunity to stay behind and partake in team sports. You don’t have such a great opportunity at the weekend to go back, join the swimming club and do all the rest of it. So, if we really want to make a difference to our health as a nation, to the appalling statistics we have on obesity, on smoking, on the cancers that I spoke of earlier this afternoon with the Cabinet Secretary for health—in all of these rising rates that we have—. One in two people born after 1960 will have cancer. That is a horrifying statistic. The way to make the difference is to grab the young, engage them—don’t let anybody escape; don’t let them go and live in Angle and not be able to get out. Let’s find ways of bringing sport to young families, sport to young people, because, by doing that, we are going to not only protect them as individuals but take such an enormous burden off our country going forward. Public health is in quite a crisis. It needs a lot of money to try and sort it out. There’s not a lot, perhaps, that you can do for someone of my advanced age—I can tell you that now. But my children—my 11-year-old and my 13-year-old—they have a real chance. Put the money into the kids and really let’s try to get that grass-roots sport up and running. The benefits to our society are incalculable.