4. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales — Our national ambitions to prevent and reduce obesity in Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:45 pm on 29 January 2019.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 4:45, 29 January 2019

Thank you for the comments. You're right to point out the differential scale of the challenge that we face. And it's part of the re-normalisation of activity and thinking about the choices that we make as parents, because we make choices for our children, and, in doing so, we're actually helping to set their patterns for life, and that is part of our challenge. Again, it goes back to not judging people. If you say to parents, 'You're bad parents because your child is overweight', that is never going to—well, for the great majority of people, that will send them further away and it won't engage the level of trust and the conversation we need to have about how we make those healthier choices much easier for people. And there are micro-community examples of things that have worked. The challenge is to do this at scale, and that's our big challenge: to have significant cultural change and community changes in behaviour.

There is always a greater opportunity to be had when children are younger and parents are, frankly, more likely to share stories with each other. You're more likely to have interaction with parents when the children are younger, with the different activities they undertake pre primary school and after as well. So, there is a real point of opportunity within those early years in life. We're actually seeing some helpful changes with, for example, the First 1000 Days programme, but we're looking to have a greater scale in consistency and activity.

On the broader point about how we're working across Government, on the healthy and active theme, we initially actually had two different strategies: one on activity and one on healthy weight. We've deliberately brought them together because there are clear links and we want to make them deliberate. In fact, last week, I and the Deputy Minister were attending the cross-Government group looking at how we take forward greater activity, to look at the different levers of Government from active travel to a healthier environment to people in Lesley Griffiths's team, and to look at how we deal with this across Government and not just say, 'This is about health and education'. And that's also part of the reason why we had the healthy and active fund working with not just Sport Wales but also, for example, with Natural Resources Wales as well to make use of the assets we already have, and, again, to normalise the use of those assets that exist within easy reach of every community to make sure people know that they're there and actually take up the opportunity to use them.