6. 6. Welsh Conservatives Debate: Obesity

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:11 pm on 11 January 2017.

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Photo of Suzy Davies Suzy Davies Conservative 4:11, 11 January 2017

Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd, and thank you, everyone, for taking part in the debate today. I, too, like Oscar, am not exactly standing here in a position of strength, but I do want to contribute and sum up today’s debate. We had an individual Member debate just before the Christmas recess, if you all remember, and the scene was set for this debate then. Jenny Rathbone opened that debate with three ways of tackling what I think we all accept by now is a growing problem, with long-term effects, of a condition that society tends to represent through the medium of fashion, through body image, through fad diets—the sorts of things that Caroline Jones was mentioning. And if the magazines we buy and the programmes we watch and the adverts we see don’t begin to change that narrative then genuinely I think you as a Government and we as an Assembly are going to have an uphill struggle trying to get sporadic nudge-based awareness-raising campaigns to have any impact at all. And, at the same time, people of all ages remain vulnerable to the dark side of those glossy magazines and social media and the Sky Living programmes that we all know about, so that we end up with the sort of things—or, shall we say, threats—that Bethan Jenkins mentioned earlier on in the debate, in her intervention to Angela.

It’s why I’m no fan at all, I’m afraid, of using public disapprobation of food and eating as a tool of population behaviour change as we’ve done, perhaps, with smoking and as we’re now starting to do with alcohol. It really does need a completely different approach. None of the ideas we’ve heard of today can be overlooked. They’ve all been really, really good ideas; we’ve heard a lot of them before, but we have to take a sort of reality check, I think, in what these things can look like in real life. We need some genuine, quite firm, political will here as well as public education in order to get through, or make sure that really good ideas don’t suffer from anchors of things that don’t work, and I’ll just give you some ideas of what I’m talking about.

So, for example, I think we’ve all, in turn, over the last five years or so, applauded the idea of the reintroduction of home economics, and Angela mentioned today more space for PE on the school curriculum, but is there the political will to create space on that curriculum, or even to create a longer school day to make sure that that is included? The various healthy school initiatives—I really liked, actually, the evidence you gave in the previous debate, Jenny, about the Flintshire experience and what’s going on up there, but, you know, I tend to think that, however well informed a teenager is, however early we say that eating apples is good, as we do in primary schools to some good effect, you give your standard teenager the opportunity to go out at lunchtime and grab a McDonald’s and that’s what they’re going to do. So, is there the political will to say, ‘Actually, nobody should be leaving school at lunchtime’? I’m not necessarily advocating that, but these are questions I think we have to address to make this stuff happen.

Sugar tax: how high do you go? I am very sad in having tracked the cost of a Mars bar, from when decimalisation was introduced, from 3p to 65p over a lifetime. The size of the Mars bar has shrunk considerably. I am still buying them. I know that they’re bad for me. How expensive do you have to make them to make people stop buying them? And that question matters in poorer communities where access to a variety of shops is really difficult.

On exercise, Dai, as a shorty, I probably take far more steps over a given length than, say, Nathan Gill here. [Laughter.] And, do you know, you are absolutely right about walking: it’s free, but time-poor sluggish individuals—I’m not even talking about me on this occasion—are put off walking by simple things like the weather and, in terms of younger people, by safety. People have been in this Assembly for long enough to know that I’ve talked about safety. [Interruption.] I’m going to mention cycling in a second, but I’m running out of time, okay? So, finally, what I wanted to say about active travel, and for cycling as well, is: please make ‘safety first’ the key ingredient, because if it’s not, it ain’t going to work.