Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. At present, 177,000 people in Wales live with diabetes. It’s possible that around 70,000 additional people suffer from it but they’re not aware of it or haven’t received a confirmed diagnosis, and by 2030 it’s expected that that number will be around 300,000 people. So, while having diabetes is a major issue for the person who is suffering from it, it’s a major problem for the health service more widely, and around 10 per cent of the budget, as we’ve heard several times here, goes towards dealing with diabetes, and a majority of that goes towards treating complications. One out of every five beds in hospitals in Wales is used by a patient who has diabetes, and those complications linked to that do create that deep impact on well-being and health and the use of healthcare services. That also means, of course, that introducing better management and more appropriate and effective management offers an excellent opportunity not just to improve the health of people in Wales, but also to save money for our public services.

I’ll come to our first amendment here: the importance of providing and holding structured education programmes for those who have just received a diagnosis of diabetes. Now, last year Diabetes UK showed that the lack of use of these courses has reached a shocking level. Only 2 per cent of those who had received a diagnosis of diabetes type 1 recently across England and Wales, and only 6 per cent of those who’d received a diagnosis of diabetes type 2, again across England and Wales, had attended a course. Now, the figures for Wales only are even worse. Only 1 per cent of those with type 1 diabetes and 0.9 per cent of those with type 2 diabetes had registered that they had attended a structured education programme. The figures also show that only 24 per cent of patients in Wales with type 1 diabetes were even offered the opportunity to attend a course. Clearly, therefore, those types of figures—and I know that the Cabinet Secretary is aware of them—should have piqued the interest of the Government.

There are now two references to education in the annual statement on progress. One refers to digital provision for adults. A platform was launched last year, and that is of course a development to be welcomed. But we would encourage the Government to consider how they will be reaching those that have been disenfranchised digitally, or those that would benefit more from a face-to-face process.

Now, the second reference notes that, even though there has been some improvement in the number of people who take advantage of structured education amongst children and young people, more than 50 per cent of children and young people don’t use the programme, with work continuing to identify the barriers to that. I think that that response is too slow. Now, the financial benefits, and, of course, the health benefits, of ensuring structured education more widely are too obvious to be left to a process that will go on organically in seeking an answer. We need an urgent response by the Government to ensure that many more people have access to structured education.

I also want to draw attention to the failure to ensure that all patients receive the full set of health audits and access to the care processes. The progress report notes that the percentage of patients that receive all eight processes has decreased over the previous years. In the long term, this could have a serious impact on general health, and the national health service in Wales needs to ensure that more is done to improve this performance. There is a great deal more that the Government could be doing.

In terms of the Minister’s intention not to support amendment 1 because he feels that it doesn’t reflect the situation fairly, well, the figures, I’m afraid, do show that there is a major problem in terms of access to structured education specifically. I’ll come very briefly to the second amendment, which of course refers to obesity, and I’m pleased to have the Government’s support on this. It’s clearly a major problem—the major public health problem facing us. I look forward to collaborating with the Government, hopefully, to have a strategy to tackle obesity on the face of the Public Health (Wales) Bill. So, please do let us acknowledge the seriousness of that problem and deal with it. But, considering the evidence that type 2 diabetes can be reversed through a healthy diet for some people, it appears to me that this is still being undervalued to some extent and there is a great deal more that needs to be done.