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 4:34 pm on 29 January 2019.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 4:34, 29 January 2019

I disagree with you one thing, where I think you were saying that poor diet shouldn't be a defining feature. Unfortunately, it is a defining feature of Wales. We are the most obese nation in Europe, and that is a pretty shocking statistic. So, we have to stop talking about it and we actually have to do things about it.

I absolutely agree with the focus on the first 1,000 days; I agree that's a very good place to start. But, as you do acknowledge, we can't leave it to schools to pick up the burden of tackling childhood obesity on their own; we have to work with them. But we absolutely have to tackle food in schools. My predecessor as the Member for Cardiff Central, Jenny Randerson, fought long and hard to introduce the Healthy Eating in Schools (Wales) Measure 2009 and she had this vision of instituting freshly made, fresh food in schools. It simply hasn't happened. We still have the large multiple catering companies bringing in food from goodness knows where and, frankly, there is next to no monitoring going on. I was devastated to learn that Flintshire had abandoned the Food for Life programme they had instituted with the Soil Association because that included elements of monitoring as to where the food was coming from. In none of the catering organisations now serving our local authorities is there any monitoring going on. Since 2013, Estyn has an obligation to report on food and drink, but does not inspect it. And there isn't anybody else doing it unless you've got particularly vigilant governors or school councils. So, we need legislation.

We cannot have catering companies flogging bottles of water in school because they simply don't provide it in a jug. This is outrageous. And we have to remember that people like Gareth Wyn Jones struggled to make meals from fresh food when he tried to do that in Canton in west Cardiff, simply because there isn't enough fresh vegetables available within a 50-mile radius. We already have the hallmarks of what needs to be done in Kevin Morgan's report, 'Good Food For All', published by Institute of Welsh Affairs in 2015, and that is public procurement in schools, hospitals, care homes, prisons and government buildings. That is something that the Government already has powers over, and we need to start instituting healthy food being served up in all of those intuitions as one of the ways in which we need to start changing the conversation. 

Lastly, I do hope that the Minister will support Veg Power's latest approach to making vegetables fun for children, because it's no use simply telling children they've got to eat five a day—that isn't going to work, particularly if their parents are simply unaware of the five-a-day message. So, 'eating veg is fun' is the way forward in my view. I think there's an excellent little advert that went out on ITV last week, and I hope that the Minister will associate himself with that sort of creative way of getting children engaged in what they're eating is what they are going to turn into.