I’m delighted to be able to speak today in the debate. I’d first of all like to actually thank very much Allison Williams, the chair of the diabetes implementation group, and all of the partners within it, because, reading both the 2016 delivery plan and the 2017 annual statement, I do see real progress. There are some very good ways forward. There have been some very strong and structured and above all—and fairly unusual—measureable systems of seeing that there have been some really good wins. I think that’s to be welcomed, and I pay all credit to the team who are behind this.

I’m happy to support both of the amendments tabled by Plaid Cymru. Minister, I thought that when you made your opening statement you gave us all a very stark warning about the dangers of diabetes on a personal level, what happens to the individual—whether they have type 1 or type 2; if you’re a child and you have type 1, the effect it has on your health for the rest of your life; the fact that, as a type 2 diabetic, you might be able to move some of the effects that it has on you by changing your lifestyle. I thought that you laid a very stark warning out as to the effect it has on the public finance, the long-term effect it will have on the NHS, the growth in diabetes, and, when, in particular, we’re looking at type 2, the enormous costs and huge intellectual effort that’s been put into place to deal with something that, actually, we need not suffer from—that, in a great many instances, we need not have.

So, having read both the update and the delivery plan and listened to what you said, and listened to what Rhun said, actually I’ve just decided I just want to make one comment: why oh why are we not looking at how we do physical education in schools? Because, Minister, I’m going to just quote your words here. You said we’re not successful in delivering these changes. We don’t exercise enough. We do not eat well enough. You’re looking at mandatory actions such as sugar tax—you’re talking about do we need to do that. You know, these are stark warnings. I have a group of people in my constituency who are all amputees, and every single one of them is an amputee because of diabetes. They tend to be middle-aged and older people, and in fact it’s a pretty rotten way to end the rest of your life, struggling—and they do struggle, and, because they’re diabetic, and because they’ve already lost one limb, they actually often go on to lose a second limb, because their circulation is so shot.

But the one thing that this Government could do today is change how we introduce exercise into schools. If we gave our kids more time for PE, and if we made PE far more fun, and we really engaged these young people so that when they left school and they went from primary to secondary and secondary into colleges and colleges into adults they’ve actually got that partly in their DNA—that exercise does not actually have to be running round and round and round a rugby, hockey or football pitch, but that exercise can be dancing, can be riding a horse, can be jogging up and down, can be doing aerobics, can be doing circuit training, can be playing rugby, whatever it might be, whatever flicks their switches.

I have looked across other UK nations and I have looked across other European nations, because one of the things I hear from Government is the crowded curriculum: we cannot possibly squash in another hour of PE for kids in the schools. That’s simply not so. Let’s be really clear: we have some of the more depressing results in our education system, and yet you look at other schools and other countries and they will give two or three hours a week to PE, physical education, to healthy exercise, to teaching people about a positive lifestyle that can go forward.

So, here we are, spending all this time, money, and effort trying to solve a problem that, actually, if we started right back at the very beginning, we need not even have that problem. So, my plea to you, Cabinet Secretary, is for all of this great work—keep on doing it, but, actually, get hold of the education Secretary, talk to your colleagues, and let’s make a fundamental change, because we may not be able to save people who are in their 30s, 40s and 50s today, but my goodness me, if we can help the eight, nine and 10-year-olds and the teenagers and the young 20-year-olds today, we might actually avert this terrible problem that you yourself have laid out so very clearly is a time bomb waiting to go off in our NHS.