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 4:39 pm on 29 January 2019.

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Photo of Gareth Bennett Gareth Bennett UKIP 4:39, 29 January 2019

Thanks, Minister, for your statement today. Obesity is an important issue, as all of the speakers have made clear, and it's going to become more and more of a problem, financially, unless we can get to grips with it. I think I don't disagree with anything that anyone else has said in the Chamber today, but different people are coming from different angles, and it's going to be a difficult job to bring all of these approaches together in a coherent programme. So, there are difficulties ahead. Jenny Rathbone was just talking about the importance of the school diet, and she also mentioned public procurement, which is something that has cropped up recently on the environment committee, which is chaired by Mike Hedges, who's also a very keen proponent of using the lever of public procurement. So, this is something that we could do, and it could also link in to food producers in a post-Brexit environment finding a market for their produce. So, I hope that there is some way in which that idea of public procurement can feed into your programme of tackling obesity. Of course, that's only one angle. Physical activity is certainly another major issue and the need to increase physical activity among the young, and I think it needs to be brought into schools as much as it can be done. But you've actually yourself raised some of the issues that other people have also touched on, in that we can't just limit physical activity to people who are good at it, because the problem, actually, is getting people who are not that great at physical activity, who may not think that they've got a physically very attractive body or a sporty body, into meaningful physical activity. Angela Burns has raised this issue before when she's spoken about it from the Conservative benches. So, this is one of the problems.

Darren Millar was talking about social prescribing, which of course is another thing that we can meaningfully use. But again the problem of social prescribing is that, if you're going to get people to go to gyms, if people think that they're fat, they're probably, a lot of them—it's going to be difficult to get them to go to the gym because they will probably have certain anxieties about their body shape. So, these are massive difficulties, and how we are going to overcome them, I don't know. We do need a joined-up approach.

Active travel is also certainly part of it, and I'm slightly concerned about the way that active travel has kind of been bounced around the Government in the past. It's gone between different portfolios and different departments and different Ministers. So, I hope it's something that is going to be taken seriously. Seemingly, Lee Waters, I think you suggested, or someone suggested, may now be responsible for it. Now, we don't have any real evidence that, since the active travel Act was introduced, levels of participation have improved much. So, I think we do need to use that Act, get a grip of it, implement it properly and use it as part of your programme. So, it's a wide-ranging issue and I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on it today.