I thank you very much for those questions and also thank you for the very constructive session that we had with committee in which we explored in quite some detail the aspects of physical activity to which you referred. You asked about the statistics—the figure of £51 million as a cost to the NHS every year in terms of the lack of physical activity. That figure was given to us by Public Health Wales. They’ve done a scoping exercise, looking at the economic cost of various things such as domestic violence, mental health, physical inactivity, smoking and many other aspects as well in a new document called ‘Making a Difference’. It’s a shorter document, but underpinned by a robust evidence base, looking at these various aspects. Although this just specifically relates to the physical inactivity’s cost to the NHS, obviously there is a much wider cost in terms of costs to the economy, for example, costs to people’s own quality of life and so on, as well. So, this was just looking at one of those aspects.

You talked about the importance of getting children engaged with active travel at a very, very early stage in their lives, and we’re completely on the same page there. I think our eco-schools programme has a particular role to play in that. Over 860 schools in Wales have already achieved the international Green Flag award for the work that they’ve been doing on eco-schools and, as part of that, they’ve been looking at things—there are walk-to-school days, for example, and walking-bus programmes. Schools have junior road safety officers, and in some of those schools they’ll be making bespoke parking tickets to put on the cars of parents who have perhaps parked insensitively and inappropriately on pavements and so on outside schools. I think that having a message perhaps from a child that is handwritten is much more powerful than politicians and others telling parents where they should and shouldn’t park and so on. I think children have a really important role to play in this particular agenda.

We’re trying to make sure that children are also safe on the roads from the youngest age as well, which is why, through the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure’s department, we’re identifying and creating safe routes to schools for walking and cycling, and that’s very central to the active travel Act. Nearly £800,000 is also paid to local authorities for child pedestrian training, and 17,000 primary school children have benefited from that. That’s about helping children have confidence to walk to school, but also making them understand what they need to do to keep themselves safe whilst doing so. Over £0.5 million is also paid to local authorities for national standard cycle training, which benefits 15,000 primary school pupils a year as well. Cardiff is receiving a grant at the moment to pilot some new approaches to refresher training for children as well, because we can teach this at a certain point, but then we want to see whether there is a benefit actually to offering refresher training and perhaps more detailed training that is more age-appropriate for them as they grow older.

On the issue of infrastructure, we’ve made it very clear—and I spoke to my colleague, the Cabinet Secretary, earlier about this today as well—how important it is that the major infrastructure projects and all infrastructure projects have active travel at the heart, really, because we have an Act in Wales that is there to promote active travel. So, it should be done looking at integrated transport in the wider sense, so including walking and cycling opportunities as well.