We now move to item 3, a debate by individual Members under Standing Order 11.21, and I call on Lee Waters to move the motion.

Motion NDM6089 Lee Waters, Rhun ap Iorwerth, Huw Irranca-Davies, John Griffiths

Supported by David Melding, Janet Finch-Saunders

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

1. Recognises the multiple health and wellbeing benefits of physical activity.

2. Notes that only 35 per cent of Welsh children are getting the recommended hour of physical activity that they need every day.

3. Recognises the potential of the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 to raise levels of physical activity amongst all age groups.

4. Calls on the Welsh Government to fully engage communities in identifying the new routes that would link up local destinations and would be most likely to be well used.

Motion moved.

Diolch, Lywydd. I’m pleased to be among many Members from across the Chamber who’ve come together for today’s debate to ensure that we fulfil the potential of the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013.

As the motion notes, there are multiple health and well-being benefits from physical activity, and we are facing a ticking time bomb of obesity. We are finally acknowledging the all too often hidden affliction of mental health, and there are wider challenges: the damage inflicted on our natural environment from rising carbon emissions contributed to by our over-reliance on cars; the social injustice of locating services under the assumption that every family in Wales has access to a car, forcing the poorest 20 per cent to spend a quarter of their income on running a car. We commonly talk about fuel poverty applying to households who spend more than 10 per cent of their income on fuel as being in fuel poverty, but we don’t talk about transport poverty, which hits the poorest hardest.

There are few interventions that can impact across such broad and pervasive challenges, and active travel is one of them. You may not be able to persuade people who take no physical activity to go into a gym or onto a football pitch, but creating an environment that encourages active travel, which builds activity into their everyday routines, is achievable. There’s considerable potential to change the way we take short journeys. Twenty per cent of car trips are for journeys of under one mile, the kind of journey that can be made in 20 minutes on foot. And half of all car journeys—half—are for journeys of under five miles. This is the distance of a typical 30-minute bike trip on a traffic-free path, like the millennium coastal path in my constituency, or the Taff trail here in Cardiff bay.

But there are barriers, not least a physical environment that has encouraged car use and discouraged walking and cycling for short journeys. The Foresight panel on obesity coined the term ‘obesogenic’ to describe the environment we’ve built up, which they reckon will result in 60 per cent of men being obese by 2050.

Now, the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 can play a significant part in challenging that. It has the potential to be one of the most radical of the laws introduced by the Welsh Government, and the single most important public health intervention we can introduce to reduce pressure on the NHS. Data from a long series of studies have shown the profound benefits of encouraging physical activity, from reduced risk of coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, type 2 diabetes, to improved concentration, confidence and the alleviation of stress.

But one of the challenges for implementing this agenda is that it doesn’t fall to public health professionals to implement, but to transport professionals. And, in transport terms, this is a marginal agenda. For 50 years, transport policy has been dominated by creating more space for cars and engineering roads to allow cars to travel faster. Pedestrians and cyclists have been literally pushed to one side. So, the challenge for implementing this is to change that culture and we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult that will be. Back in February, the enterprise committee rightly pointed out that the Act needs determined leadership to succeed. But just as leadership at a ministerial level is necessary—and I know that Rebecca Evans and Ken Skates are deeply committed to this agenda—we need to see leadership at every level to set the example, to normalise the behaviour, as it was normal only a few generations ago.

We need leadership from parents: instead of clicking their kids into the backs of cars for short journeys—sometimes very short—instead to make the effort to walk. We need leadership from highway engineers, safety auditors and transport planners, to build in convenient welcoming routes as a matter of course. The national cycle network, for example, developed by the green transport charity, Sustrans, aspires to design routes that would feel safe for an unaccompanied 12-year-old on a bike. How many of our current cycle lanes or shared-use paths can truthfully pass that test?

We need leadership from GPs who, instead of routinely prescribing pills, have the confidence to encourage people who are overweight or stressed or suffering one of the number of conditions that are contributed to by physical inactivity, to get active. We need leadership from schools. Active children learn better. Bike Week is all well and good, but how do we make every day Walk to School Day, every week Bike Week? For employers, there’s ample evidence that workers who cycle to work take less sick leave, and investing in showers and cycle parking will be repaid in productivity.

So, just as there are multiple benefits from getting this right, there are multiple responsibilities for getting it right too. I want to focus on what I consider to be the primary responsibility, and one that is mentioned in the motion, and that’s ensuring the full engagement of communities.

The target audience for this agenda is not people who walk and cycle—they do it already. It’s people who do not. A coloured strip of tarmac down a busy road that suddenly disappears under parked cars will not do the trick. We only have to look to the streets that have tried that to see it. The temptation is for councils to build where it’s easiest, not where the potential for use is greatest. This is an ambitious agenda; it will be difficult and it will take time. But we need to know where people want to go—the routes that they’d be tempted to try. In some communities, it might be the daily trip to work that gets them on their bikes, in others, a Saturday trip to the local leisure centre.

We need to know about wider interventions too, beyond infrastructure, that’ll encourage them: cycle training on real road conditions for adults and children, easy-to-read maps and signage, and walking buses for kids to get to school. What’s crucial is we won’t know until we ask. Yet, in the most recent process to establish and map all existing routes, most authorities did the minimum—an online questionnaire for the statutory minimum of 12 weeks. Across Wales, just 300 people took part. That’s less than 0.01 per cent of Wales’s population. It’s essential that wider voices are heard, and, if this Act is going to be the success I know it can be, that involves targeting people who don’t currently walk and cycle.

I applaud the joint initiative by Sustrans Cymru, Living Streets, Cycling UK and Welsh Cycling to launch a simple, easy-to-use web tool to make it easy for people to suggest new and upgraded routes. But let’s be imaginative how we use it—at school gates and trampoline parks, at cinemas and pop-up venues, in workplaces and GP surgeries. These active travel plans will have a 10 to 15-year lifespan and will be linked to future Welsh Government funding. If we don’t get this initial consultation right, it’ll be hard-fought resources down the drain.

The details really matter. Five hundred thousand pounds can be spent on a new route, but an ill-considered gate or barrier can mean it won’t be used, and I’ve seen many routes fall victim to this. That’s why it’s important we build challenge into the system. Local people should be easily able to challenge and suggest improvements to local councils. The Welsh Government needs to beef up its advice, so it can challenge the plans submitted to it by local authorities. We’ve seen from the first round of maps that there’s plenty of room for challenge. We’ve got to get this right. The Government has appointed respected place designer Phil Jones to head the expert group to agree the statutory guidance to accompany the Act, and it’s very good.

Those at the front line now need training and support to make sure they can apply it properly, and the key recommendation of that active travel Act design guidance is ‘good consultation at early stages’ to help ‘avoid poor decisions’. As it says:

‘The more opportunity people have to influence and shape walking and cycling schemes for their local area, the more likely they will be to use them.’

Getting this on the statute book, Llywydd—the first piece of legislation to complete the journey from a petition to receiving the royal seal—was the easy bit. This is a radical piece of legislation and the commitment this Government has shown to an all-too-often neglected agenda should be applauded. But this landmark law will only work if it is implemented radically, and that’s why I’m delighted to open this debate today. Diolch.

I’m pleased to participate in this very important debate, and I thank Lee Waters for opening the debate in a colourful manner, and explaining the principles underpinning the debate, particularly on the importance of the active travel Act and the need for us to think not only that the legislation is in place, but that we all should actually act upon that legislation, because it’s down to us as a society to adhere to those principles and to take action. Because, as I have said in the past here, keeping fit is crucially important—being fit is crucially important. Some of you, I’m sure, will remember these figures, because I’ve actually referred to them twice in the past month: if you are fit and healthy, then the level of sugar in your blood is 30 per cent lower, the cholesterol level is 30 per cent lower than if you weren’t fit, your blood pressure is 30 per cent lower than if you weren’t fit, and your weight in general is reduced by being physically fit. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s no tablet on earth that can bring those kinds of benefits.

Also, in responding to one of those issues relating to that we, as GPs, are far too willing to prescribe tablets, well, this is the solution. This is a way forward—keeping fit—that can replace tablets and is far more effective than a common tablet. We need to take 10,000 steps per day, and that is easily achievable, even in this place, by not using the lifts, for example.

Of course, it’s not just those who are physically fit that we’re talking about. There are also those who have long-term illnesses. Even when you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or another lung condition, or a heart condition, if you get fit, even though you have those chronic conditions, it can also improve your quality of life. Your symptoms are reduced. You are not as short of breath, in becoming fit, although you do have those problems with your lungs or your heart. That’s the basis of those programmes that we have in our hospitals and GP surgeries—pulmonary rehabilitation and cardiac rehabilitation. They make people more confident and fitter in general so that they can cope with their long-term conditions.

Therefore, it is a challenge, and this agenda demands that we all tackle this in earnest now because we know about the obesity statistics and all of the other statistics that need to be tackled. We need to get to grips with this.

Also, to return to the active travel Act, we need to make it easier for people to travel on a bicycle or to walk, as Lee Waters has already mentioned. We need to invest. If we are going to cycle to work, then we need investment in showers and changing rooms in those workplaces. That requires investment, but it also needs the vision to create that in accordance with the active travel Act, which is more important. But we need to think in broader terms about this. If you’ve ever tried to walk around Cardiff Bay—going from here to the town centre, it’s quite difficult to do as a pedestrian. It is very difficult. It’s difficult often to find a pavement, never mind actually travelling by bicycle from Cardiff Bay to the city centre. So, the message is: this is a challenge for all of us, whether we are fit or not at the moment. It’s never too late. We can all improve our health just by walking everywhere. It’s down to authorities responsible for planning our roads and other ways of travelling. We need those developments in place, and they must take into account the need to make it easier for us to cycle or to walk. Walking for 30 minutes five times a week: that is the level of fitness that individuals require. Then, there will be less demand on our GPs and less need for tablets at the end of the day. Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak in this debate on physical activity. First of all, I want to reiterate how important it is that children get as much physical activity as possibly, and that physical activity should be built into their days. We don’t want to raise a nation of couch potatoes, because we know how good physical activity is for you, as our doctor has just told us. Of course, we know it’s very good for mental health as well. Yesterday, there were a lot of mentions of the very moving occasion of the Samaritans event in the Pierhead, when Nigel Owens spoke so movingly about dealing with mental health issues. We do know that physical activity is very good for your mental health.

According to Public Health Wales in its 2016 report ‘Making a Difference’, each year, physical inactivity costs the NHS in Wales £51 million a year and increased cycling and walking in urban areas could save £0.9 billion for the NHS in Wales over 20 years. So, there’s a huge amount of difference that could be made to the actual running of our health service. So, I think that the most important thing that we can do is to encourage children to start good, healthy patterns of behaviour from an early stage in life. I do think it’s important to remember at this point that many of the activities that children undertake outside school do cost parents quite a bit money. Football clubs, swimming and tennis—parents do actually have to pay out of their pockets for a lot of that. That’s why it is so important that much of what is done is built into our education system.

I would like to praise the walking bus initiatives, which were mentioned by Lee Waters in his introduction. I would particularly like to praise the walking bus initiative at Ysgol y Wern in my constituency, which is supported now by police colleagues of Sergeant Louise Lucas, who was so tragically killed while crossing a road in Swansea in March last year. Sadly, there has been more publicity about that over the last few days. Her colleagues from Llanishen police station were determined to carry on the walking bus to the school that she had started. I went on the walking bus myself this time last year. I think the walking bus initiative is a really good way of building exercise into children’s lives, and I think it’s great for parents to know that their children are safe in walking to school. So, I think that that is an initiative that we need to push and spread as much as possible. That particular one was supported by Sustrans and by the local authority and by the police, very strongly.

Walking is, of course, the easiest and most accessible activity that we can all build into our lives. That is why I am a big supporter, as are other people here, of the active travel Act and the work that is going on to plan active travel routes for walking and cycling. Lee Waters has already mentioned the—perhaps—failure to engage in the first round of consultation. I believe he said that only 300 responses came in from the whole of Wales on the first consultation. So, I think it’s really important now that we do try and get many more views on where the routes should be. I think that if people get engaged in the process of deciding where these routes are, it is much more likely that they will actually use them.

The final point that I wanted to make, really, was about some of the gender differences that are there in terms of walking and cycling. A briefing from Sustrans earlier this year pointed out that local authorities should really bear in mind that there is a gender difference in the way that women want to cycle, for example. Women, for instance, are much keener to cycle when there are segregated cycle paths than men are.

The other issue is that I think there’s a big difference between the number of women who actually do cycle and the number of men. Only 34 per cent of women said in Cardiff that they ride bikes, compared to 66 per cent of men. So, that’s really quite a big difference, and, again, that was in Cardiff—a survey carried out by Sustrans. So, I just think we’ve got to bear in mind when we plan these things that there are specific gender issues that we should look at.

Finally, we had the International Day of the Girl yesterday. I think these international days are really important, because it really makes us remember and flag up different issues. I’d just like to quickly mention girls and sport, because, sadly, girls are still lagging behind boys when it comes to taking up physical activity in the form of sports. The most recent figures show that, in terms of those hooked on sport, 52 per cent of boys are hooked; only 44 per cent of girls are hooked. It has gone up, but there’s also a big difference between schoolchildren in areas of deprivation and by ethnic group, with Asian girls having the lowest level of participation in sport, with just 28 per cent taking part. So, I think there are lots of issues to look at.

I am indeed really grateful to Lee Waters AM for instigating this debate, to put on record, actually, some acknowledgement of the work you’ve done previously over many years in fighting through, you know, with enthusiasm and passion to implement a real focus for the main aims and purpose of the active travel Act.

You know, it’s been said here, hasn’t it, that the health and well-being effects and benefits of regular physical activity are well documented and even more proven. Regular exercise can reduce mortality by 39 per cent, increase life expectancy, reduce the risk of having a stroke by 27 per cent, of developing type 2 diabetes by 60 per cent, of developing cancer of the colon, breast or womb by 20 per cent, and can avoid brain shrinkage to help prevent dementia. Endorphins and serotonin are boosted as a natural therapy for those experiencing feelings of low self-esteem, isolation, stress and depression—a key contributory factor in terms of feeding into our prevention intervention and prudent healthcare agenda. Just 35 per cent of Welsh children undertake an hour of activity each day. Of those living within less than half a mile of their primary school, 30 per cent are driven daily, just 2 per cent cycle to primary school—and even fewer, at 1 per cent, to secondary.

Inactivity is an issue affecting adults also—34 per cent of people haven’t undertaken any form of active travel in the previous seven days, and more startlingly, 35 per cent had walked infrequently or not at all in the past three months. That is really a very poor statistic. Speak to anybody who has actually lost their own mobility now through a fall or an accident, and how their lives have changed significantly to the detriment, and they haven’t got the opportunity now, having lost their mobility, to be able to actively take part in anything going forward.

Professor Stuart Cole noted in his report to the previous Minister last year that funding levels for active travel are low, at just £5 per head, compared to other areas of the UK, which spend twice as much. Cycling England found that just £10 a head resulted in an increase of 27 per cent in cycling in their cycling demonstration towns over three years. In the Netherlands, they spend around £25 per head, and almost a third of people list cycling as their main form of transport. In Sydney—an 82 per cent increase in cycling in just two years as a result of a five-year investment in the city’s cycling strategy, including the construction of 55 km of cycle tracks to be completed this year. Compare that to us here in Wales.

Compliance by local authorities as regards the adult active travel Act design guidance is essential. They’ve undertaken the technical training, but concerns around effective monitoring of active travel grant funding must be flagged up here today, and I would ask the Cabinet Secretary to advise on how this is actually being implemented. Furthermore, wide and early engagement by local authorities in the next stage of the active travel Act is essential. The online tool launched by Cycling UK, Sustrans Cymru, Living Streets and Welsh Cycling to enable people to connect with their local authorities has seen over 600 people engaged in this way, more than double the number engaged in the first phase. However, we now look to improve that engagement with local sensory deprivation groups to ensure the voices of those who are blind, partially sighted or suffer hearing loss are not left behind.

The Welsh Government’s 2015 annual report on the Active Travel (Wales) Act fails to consider increased usage of active travel routes and how this is going to be considered when the integrated network maps are in place. I would therefore like to call on the Welsh Government for an externally commissioned review into how progress is going to be recorded under the Act, for example, using the experience of the active travel board with an academic partner. Sustrans and other stakeholders on the active travel board have called for meaningful targets for an increase in active travel to be introduced. It’s effective in Scotland, where the set of indicators in the cycling action plan are linked to a 1 per cent per annum increase in transport funding, resulting in a much higher quality of reporting. Cabinet Secretary, can you advise as to whether you will seek to introduce such targets?

Llywydd, the ambitions of the active travel Act are to be commended, but far more now needs to be done by Welsh Government to see these ambitions through. Thank you.

I’ve mentioned before, Llywydd, that in Newport we’ve been having meetings for quite some time now, which I’ve been very pleased to convene, between the local health board, and public health particularly, Newport Live, which is the leisure trust, Newport City council, housing associations, including Newport City Homes, which took the stock transfer and the major estates from Newport City Council, sports clubs and a range of others. The purpose of those meetings is to try and get Newport’s population more physically active and healthier. I hope very much that Welsh Government might support some of those initiatives coming out of those meetings, to see whether they’re effective and they work and might be rolled out across Wales, because I do believe we need pilot schemes to test some of these partnerships. Because it seems to me that, unless we build partnerships of real width, and indeed of depth, we’re not going to get the large-scale change we need to get Wales more physically active and healthy, with all the obvious benefits that brings.

We need to get on the front foot with health, rather than being largely reactive, and I believe a more physically active population is a big part of that effort. So, I think similarly for active travel we need a whole-system partnership if we are going to make active travel for short journeys the routine choice. We will need planners to get on board, and we will need local authorities and public sector employers in terms of the way they facilitate their staff to make active travel journeys to work and from work. We will need schools, of course, perhaps to do even more around safe routes to schools, cycle training, and I hope sometimes the provision of bikes for children in more disadvantaged circumstances who haven’t got bikes, perhaps through some community schemes where bikes are donated, repaired and made useable again. Also, of course, the voluntary sector and Welsh Government. We talk about whole-sector partnerships if we’re going to have large-scale change; I think that applies to physical activity generally, and it applies to active travel as well. So, I hope that’s the spirit within which we can take action forward at Welsh Government level, local government level, and with all the key partners after this debate takes place today.

We heard earlier, Llywydd, from Lee Waters, in opening the debate, of the great benefits and the radical nature of the active travel Act. Well, can I say, Llywydd, that as the Minister who had the privilege of taking the active travel legislation through the Assembly and putting it on the statute book, I very much agree with my colleague Lee Waters and, I’m sure, many other speakers in this debate today? I do believe it’s radical. I believe it could deliver a step change in terms of physical activity and health, the environment, the economy and general quality of life in Wales. So, given that promise, that potential, I hope very much that, after today, we will go on to implement the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 fully, enthusiastically and in a timely manner. Diolch yn fawr.

I’d like to start by thanking the Members in whose name this motion is tabled today. I’ll focus my remarks on the first two points of the motion, and in doing so, I’ll return to a theme I covered a few weeks ago in my short debate on outdoor education in Wales.

As the motion notes, just under two thirds of Welsh children do not get the recommended hour of physical activity, which they need to stay healthy, every day. This is simply unacceptable and, to echo the scale of the challenge, I’d like to reiterate another statistic, which really struck me: three quarters of UK children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates.

Outdoor physical activity, whether in terms of active travel or outdoors education, is good for physical health and mental well-being, and there are significant challenges that we need to address in former industrial communities, such as mine in particular. For example, recent statistics show that, in my local authority area of Rhondda Cynon Taf, approximately 63 per cent of adults are overweight or obese, 14 per cent of residents say they are being treated for a mental illness, and over a quarter of adults smoke. Raising levels of physical activity from an early age offers one solution to these really challenging health outcomes.

We are also facing a nature deficit disorder, where our children and young people are cut off from the world outside their doorsteps, which itself poses questions to our future approaches to important issues of sustainability. Only 13 per cent of Welsh children considered themselves to have a close link to the outdoors, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a figure lower than for Scotland, Northern Ireland, or even London. And, again, although it is not the only solution, encouraging active travel cannot harm our connection to the wider world.

I also think the fourth part of the motion makes an important point about our approach. We need to develop joined-up solutions between communities and stakeholders, so that destinations are linked up with new and improved travel routes. For example, an important paper produced by Natural Resources Wales on the natural opportunities provided by the landscape in Rhondda noted that, in my local authority of RCT, there are over 700 km of trails and established walks linking communities and villages to woodlands and mountains. These clearly have a role to play in encouraging active travel.

On a similar point, whilst I am delighted that the Dare Valley Country Park, in my constituency, will be the venue for Wales’s first nature-based kindergarten for children aged two to five, I am keen that active travel networks are developed to enable children and their families to reach this destination. If the purpose of this kindergarten is to encourage our children to be able to partake of the outdoors education that has been so beneficial in terms of health, confidence and well-being in other countries, surely we must work to develop complementary active travel opportunities, so that the journey becomes just as important as the destination. Thank you.

Thanks to Lee for instigating the debate. Yes, there are long-term health benefits of physical activity, which could also translate into long-term financial benefits, if, that is, we can reduce conditions such as obesity and diabetes. I acknowledge that the Welsh Government is now attempting a more joined-up approach to this issue, which inevitably crosses over the boundaries of several different Government departments.

In UKIP Wales, we welcome, for instance, the involvement of Sport Wales in promoting sport amongst those who haven’t previously been physically active, which is a welcome development. The Active Travel (Wales) Act can potentially play a large part in helping with the objective of increasing physical activity. We do need to get more people travelling to school, work, and even to the shops. To this end, targets can sometimes help—a point that Janet made earlier—and I note that in England they are currently considering a target of getting 55 per cent of schoolchildren walking to school by 2025. Although this is ambitious, if we are serious about achieving the Active Travel (Wales) Act’s aims, then perhaps we should consider setting a similar target here in Wales.

Local authorities here are beginning to respond to the nudging of groups like Living Streets, which supports walking, and Sustrans, which promotes cycling. We are seeing these groups bring in the local community with initiatives like community street audits, which aim to look at various routes from the perspective of walkers. From this, councils can learn what measures need to be introduced to improve walking access, such as bollards and railings in some instances, which require modest investment, and in other cases, simply the relocation of a lollipop man or lady, or a zebra crossing. In my own area of Canton in west Cardiff, we now have up and running a park-and-stride scheme, which gets kids walking part of the route to school. First, they walk to a safe parking area, and then they do get driven, but at least they get to walk some of the route. The other scheme promoted by Living Wales for walking is the walking bus, as mentioned previously, where children walk the whole way in an organised march, picking up more participants en route.

Cycling is the other major activity that can aid long-term health. This also raises issues. Sustrans in Cardiff, for example, have consistently questioned the facilities available for cyclists at the soon-to-be redeveloped Cardiff bus station. As the Minister is doubtless aware, there is a major office redevelopment taking place in Central Square in Cardiff, which will lead to a smaller bus station. This change has also led to questions over cycling facilities. So, I would ask what measures can the Welsh Government take to ensure that local councils adhere to the objectives of active travel by providing adequate cycling facilities in our major transport hubs? And are we to have any targets on walking to school? Thank you.

As there seems to be widespread consensus across all parties here, I just want to introduce a little bit of urgency and perhaps challenge to this debate. The fourth clause calls on the Welsh Government to fully engage communities in identifying new routes that would link up local destinations, and they would be most likely to be well used. No. 1: I’d like to suggest that Dai Lloyd tries out Lloyd George Avenue as a route to the city centre, because it’s an excellent bicycling and walking route until you get to Callaghan Square and then it becomes a bit of a death trap. So, it would be great if you would track it and then make recommendations to Cardiff council on how to make it safer, because it’s great while you go down Lloyd George Avenue and it’s pretty atrocious once you get to the city centre. So, that’s one thing.

One of the most important things we do is to receive schools that visit the Senedd from our constituencies, and I pledged to routinely ask all the schools that visit from my own constituency, ‘How did you get to school this morning?’, because I find it very revealing that although there is a significant proportion who do either walk or cycle, there’s nevertheless also a very significant proportion of young people who live within a mile of their primary school who are going by car. That really is an absolute nonsense. It’s neither good for the child, nor good for the environment, nor good for the community. So, we really do need to raise this up the agenda. It should be absolutely mandatory that all schools have an active travel policy so that when somebody signs up to attend that school, we are able to say to them, ‘This is the active travel route that you should be taking today.’

I was speaking to a headteacher from, I think, one of the Valleys constituencies, and she said, ‘Well, my school is at the very top of a high hill.’ I recognise that that is a big challenge for a child to bicycle to school, not just because it’s uphill, because young people can bicycle uphill, but because downhill is one of the most dangerous things about bicycling and it is not for the uninitiated. But her children walk to school, because that’s what we do, and that’s what we always did. So, I think we need to get a lot more demanding of our parents in asking them why it is they are taking their children to school even though we know that they are going to be better prepared to learn in the morning by having got the blood rushing around their head through walking or bicycling to school.

We really do have an education programme to do with our families, because I think a lot of children who don’t currently walk or cycle to school would like to do so. So, I would like to suggest that, just as in the National Assembly we have a buy-a-bike scheme for our staff, which I believe has had an excellent uptake, we should be trying, as John Griffiths has suggested, to get a buy-a-bike scheme for all our schools, particularly those where they’re spending up to 20 per cent of their income, as Lee Waters has said, on travel, which is clearly a major issue for their family income and one that would solve several birds with one stone. So, I think that’s something where we ought to be involving the voluntary sector and getting grants that people could then pay back the cost of the bicycle gradually.

I appreciate the picture is a lot more complicated in rural areas, but I represent an urban constituency and there is no excuse, really, why any of the young people in my constituency, with the possible exception of those in the care system or obviously disabled children—.

Most people should be going to school either by walking, bicycling or by public transport. There’s a great deal more we need to do. I think school is a good place to start by engaging with families and to really challenge them, ‘Are you going to be taking your child to work?’, because why on earth are we taking them to secondary school? So, if we could get schools to be the point from where we could discuss how children could be getting safely to school by making minor adjustments to the obesogenic environment landscape that is our road schemes, then that might (a) get them more involved in understanding that there are safe routes to school and (b) ensure that local authorities are doing everything possible to ensure that that is the case. So, I would strongly urge the Government to really make this a much more central part of its overall well-being agenda.

I call on the Minister for Social Services and Public Health, Rebecca Evans.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. Members will remember in my recent oral statement I set out what the Welsh Government is doing to support active travel in Wales and what we’re doing more broadly to encourage people to become more physically active. I’m pleased to give my full support to the motion being debated today and I’m very grateful to Members for the genuine interest and enthusiasm that they are bringing to this agenda.

Our programme for government includes a commitment to support people to be healthy and active. Achieving this, though, requires cross-portfolio action to create the environment and the opportunity for people to make healthier lifestyle choices. We continue to work closely with our partners, including Sport Wales, Public Health Wales, Natural Resources Wales and a really wide range of third sector organisations to ensure that people are aware of the benefits of physical activity and are motivated and provided with opportunities to introduce physical activity into their daily lives. Sport Wales has a number of programmes in place which encourage young people in particular to take part in sport and physical activity and I’m really pleased to report that participation rates are increasing, but we do know that there is more work to do.

Over the summer we have considered, alongside interested parties, a range of recommendations to increase levels of physical activity. Dr Frank Atherton, the Chief Medical Officer for Wales, will chair a newly established cross-cutting group to prioritise our actions to support this agenda. This work will help inform our healthy and active strategy, which we have committed to in our programme for government.

The second point of the motion today refers to the Welsh health survey data on physical activity rates among children. Improving the physical activity levels amongst children must be a priority because the benefits of a healthy and active lifestyle in childhood are realised throughout life. There is also a link between physical activity and educational attainment. I saw a real example of this recently when I visited Pantysgallog Primary School to see how they’ve introduced a 1-mile walk, jog or run for all key stage 2 pupils, and that takes place between breakfast club and the start of the school day. In addition to the health benefits, the teachers at the school have noticed a reduction in disruptive behaviour during lessons and the children told me about their improved concentration levels. They also told me how much fun they thought it was, and we can’t over emphasise how important that is.

The latest Welsh health survey results reported that the rate of school-age children meeting the chief medical officer’s recommended level of physical activity has increased by 1 per cent to 36 per cent, so things are moving in the right direction, but we want to accelerate that improvement. This requires a whole-of-society response.

Schools do have a key role to play. In response to the ‘Successful Futures’ report by Professor Donaldson, we’re developing a new curriculum that will support children and young people to become healthy and confident individuals. The implementation of six new areas of learning experiences will be central to the new curriculum and one of which will be health and well-being. Our programme for government makes clear our commitment to work with schools to raise awareness of the importance of healthy lifestyle choices.

The Welsh Network of Healthy School Schemes supports a whole-school approach to health. Ninety-nine per cent of all maintained schools are involved in the scheme and it’s regarded as one of the best in Europe. Furthermore, the scheme has been successfully extended now to include pre-school settings.

The Active Journeys programme, which works in schools to promote active travel to and from school, complements these efforts in a really practical way and makes resources and support available to schools across Wales. To build on this, I can announce today that I’ll be commissioning Living Streets to deliver a Walk to School in Wales project, which will highlight the health benefits of active travel. It will also support a number of schools to carry out their own review of walking routes in their area, offering a sustainable way of assessing and identifying ways of improving the active travel infrastructure.

The home environment also plays a vital role. Public Health Wales’s 10 Steps to a Healthy Weight campaign helps parents instil healthy habits in their children by setting out easy steps they can take to support their child to develop and maintain a healthy weight, such as limiting screen time and encouraging outdoor play. Through our newly launched Healthy Child Wales programme, we’ll ensure that health visitors are able to support families to make healthy choices from before birth to the age of seven.

The third point in the motion highlights the potential of the active travel Act to raise physical activity levels across the population. You’ve heard me say before that I see active travel as a key element of building physical activity into people’s daily lives and that the Act puts in place the framework to support this. It does so by mandating the planning of coherent walking and cycling networks in our communities across Wales and promoting their use. To ensure that these networks are fit for purpose and that they really meet people’s needs, local authorities need to involve those who regularly walk and cycle, but also, as we’ve heard, crucially, those who don’t. I was pleased to meet recently with our active travel board, to demonstrate how seriously I take their work. And I’m delighted that Dr Adrian Davis has agreed to join our board as he brings with him a significant expertise, both in active travel and in public health.

In relation to the fourth point of the motion, we agree that effective community engagement is key to determining how local active infrastructure is best designed, and this is a requirement that we put on local authorities, which are best placed to engage with the varying needs and assets of their local communities.

Thank you for giving way. I think it’s around three years now since I remember questioning the Member for Llanelli in a previous life, when I was Chair of the Enterprise and Business Committee and he was giving evidence for Sustrans. So, three years have passed and we spoke about all this then. It’s all great stuff, but what is actually happening on the ground with these cycle networks? Are you confident that local authorities are delivering them?

Local authorities are very aware of how seriously Welsh Government takes the implementation of the Act and one of the first things that I did after coming into post was to remind them of their duties under the Act, but it’s not just that this is a responsibility of people in travel; actually it’s a responsibility of people in local government right across. So, local authorities now are preparing their integrated maps and we will see developments in the future to fill those gaps that people are identifying through the project that Janet Finch-Saunders mentioned. It’s the campaign by Cycling UK, Living Streets, Sustrans Cymru and Welsh Cycling in order to help people to engage with the process and let the local authorities know exactly where they need local improvements to cycling and walking networks.

So, in relation to the fourth point of the motion, we do agree how important that local engagement is. We can and will, however, continue to provide the leadership at a national level to support local authorities in their work. So, I think it’s really clear from the thoughtful contributions that we’ve had to the debate today that we all agree on the important role that physical activity plays in keeping us all physically and mentally well. I do hope that this Government’s commitment to this area—not least through the prominence given to it in our programme for government, but also through the bringing together of responsibilities in this area into one portfolio—is clear for Members to see and we look forward to future support in the active travel agenda.

I call on Rhun ap Iorwerth to reply to the debate.

Thank you, Llywydd. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to have supported this motion and to support the other Members who have spoken so enthusiastically this afternoon on the need to promote physical activity and to ensure that the appropriate infrastructure is in place in terms of active travel, in order to ensure that that can happen within our communities as part of our daily lives.

The health of the people of Wales, and the children of Wales in particular, of course, is a cause of concern for each and every one of us here. There are plenty of signs that we are storing up huge health and social problems. The fact that we are spending 10 per cent of the NHS budget on treating diabetes is a stark warning to us. As Assembly Member for Ynys Môn, I wasn’t pleased to see Anglesey rising to the top of one table last year, when Public Health Wales announced that Anglesey had the highest percentage of children who were obese or overweight. A third of the children on the isle are either overweight or obese; those figures are, of course, frightening.

Of course, a lack of physical activity is at the heart of much of that. As Julie Morgan said earlier, the problem is that the patterns that children adopt early in life are often emulated when those children become adults. Therefore, we must tackle the problem at its root. I do some rugby coaching in Llangefni rugby club. I apologise to the children for the quality of my rugby coaching, but one thing that drives me is this element of promoting physical activity. There are numerous examples across Anglesey of opportunities that are provided for our young people, from rugby to football, to hockey, gymnastics, athletics, sailing—there are too many to list. It’s a wonderful thing to be in the Holyhead weightlifting and fitness centre when Holyhead school, which is nearby, closes at the end of the day and the young people flow in because the resources are available for them and there are people to inspire them to look after their own health through physical activity.

But, somehow, we must ensure that there is more physical activity happening in our schools. Of course, physical education is timetabled. But, as the motion suggests, only around a third of children in Wales get that hour of daily physical activity that is recommended. Forgive me for not getting too excited that the figure has increased from 35 per cent to 36 per cent. I do think that it’s through our schools that we should actually push up that figure for young people. I’m a strong believer, for example, in extending the school day in order to provide time to promote physical activity. We must ensure that the resources are in place in our schools. And, of course, promoting active travel in order to get to school does provide an additional layer of physical activity. I certainly welcome the new work that’s been commissioned by the Government, but it is now time, as Nick Ramsay said, for us to see those pledges becoming reality.

Let us look at slightly later in life, where physical activity is just as crucial. Age Cymru remind us that ensuring adequate levels of physical activity is crucial to the older population for the sake of their general health, but also for the sake of their independence and their ability to play a full part in society. What is wonderful, of course, is that that physical activity can be a core part of their daily lives because one tool that we have, which is supposed to help in this, is the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013.

Unfortunately, the health benefits of active travel aren’t appreciated enough. The system to assess the cost-benefits of projects actually leaves health benefits out of the assessment, for example, which means that active travel plans don’t necessarily score as highly as they should. Sustrans—we’ve heard them mentioned a number of times today—are of the view that not all departments of government appreciate the benefits of active travel. Their experience is that, to date, it’s only transport departments that have this on their radar. We’ve heard that referred to already today, but if we are to create a culture of active travel in Wales, then we need a far broader workforce actually making it work and making it happen. That silo mentality has to come to an end.

As the motion states, and as the Member for Llanelli stated, we must work effectively and efficiently with communities in order to identify how to make the most of that legislative tool that we have. Let us, therefore, promote active travel with new enthusiasm and energy. It’s clear across this Chamber that we share the same ambition. It’s clear that we share common views on the direction of travel and, therefore, it’s time to achieve the vision that John Griffiths as Minister had, and this Chamber—the Assembly—more generally had, back in 2013 when the Act was passed. So, let’s promote active travel, let’s promote physical activity throughout our society, and let’s make Wales a healthier country. I encourage you to support the motion.

The proposal is to agree the motion. Does any Member object? [Objection.] I will therefore defer voting under this item until voting time.

Voting deferred until voting time.