Yes, it’s a significant achievement that the Welsh football team has reached the European championship finals, as was noted in the Chamber last week as well. Yes, it would be nice to imagine that this sort of achievement in professional sport will trigger major increases in participation in amateur sport at youth and grass-roots levels. Unfortunately, this does not always prove to be the case. Much is made nowadays of what will be the legacy of a particular sporting event—for instance, London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics. Unfortunately though, staging huge events such as the Olympics costs rather a lot of money, and the London boroughs afterwards found that their budgets for contributing to grass-roots sport were actually cut. So, it may be the case that, in reality, there is no real positive legacy from such an event. To protect and improve grass-roots sport, we should first recognise that investment in this area can be seen as leading to a long-term cost saving as healthy and sporting youngsters and young adults are much less likely to become unfit or obese adults later on in life. There could be major savings in future NHS bills in return for relatively small investments now.

Instead of cutting sports funding, we need to invest. Invest where, though? Well, we need to strengthen the place of physical education in schools, we need to enhance links between the schools and sports clubs; PE teachers should be encouraged to develop these links. There could be a programme of regular visits to school PE lessons from club coaches in each local authority area. Youngsters of varying abilities need to be encouraged to sign up to sports clubs, not just the elite, and grants to clubs could reflect this kind of sporting diversity.

Angela just mentioned the issue of parkruns. This has cropped up recently in the national press. I believe there were parkruns organised in Hampstead Heath and possibly other parks in London, and there was an issue that they may be charged by local councils—the people organising the parkruns—for the use of the public parklands, which, to me, seems entirely ludicrous. And that’s a path that we need to make sure we don’t follow in Wales. We should be encouraging this kind of voluntary activity that could get lots of people who are not particularly sporting—it could get them involved in sport, because it is a mass participation event. You don’t have to be that good to go to a parkrun; there will be people just as slow as you if you’re one of the slowest. So, we need to encourage that kind of activity, as Angela suggested.

Finally, there are many young adults in Wales who have graduated in sports science in recent years who are not employed in this field. Their talents and enthusiasm for sport need to be harnessed and we need to think constructively about how we can best invest to utilise this latent talent pool.