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.