I'd like to extend my thanks, as others have already said, to everybody who participated in this very important piece of work by our committee. I came, of course, to this work towards the end—I joined the committee towards the end of the process—and it has been quite a revelation to look back and read through some of the evidence in preparing for responding to the draft committee report. As others have said—and I won't detain the Chamber's time in repeating it—this is an incredibly serious issue. The long-term impact on children of being unfit and overweight when they're really small is lifelong, and I think we should have cognisance of the comments made by Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson today about how, if we don't deal with these issues now, we are building up problems for the future, both for those individual children, but also for all of us as a society.

Of course, as Dai Lloyd has said, it's very positive on one level that the Welsh Government has accepted so many of the committee's recommendations. But, however, as Dai has already said, too much of that acceptance seems to be, 'It's perfectly all right because we're already doing it.' Well, having looked back at the evidence that the committee received, this is simply not the case, and I would urge Welsh Ministers to give the committee the respect and understanding that we would not be recommending that you do things that you're already doing. We might congratulate you, we might say how grateful we are to you for that, but we wouldn't ask you to do things that you're already doing.

I want to say a few words quickly about three specific recommendations, Deputy Presiding Officer. Now, the Welsh Government's response to recommendation 5, which is about the skills of teachers in the early years and the importance of children developing those fundamental motion skills, the evidence is very clear: the Government response says that perhaps we can do some more case studies. Well, we've already done that work; you don't need to do it for us. There are established methods of improving practitioners' skills in this area, and the evidence, as Dai has already said, is clear that at the moment the skills are not there. I mean, I've trained as a teacher and people taught me a lot about child development when it came to literacy and a lot about child development when it came to numeracy, but the expectation was that child development in terms of their physical development would just come through play. We know that that isn't true.

So, we have an acceptance of a recommendation here, but it's an acceptance that just tells us it's all right, it's happening anyway. Well, it isn't all right and it isn't happening anyway. Now, the Welsh Government have rejected two of the committee's recommendations, and, in some ways, of course that's the Government's absolute right to do that. And I want to talk briefly about recommendation 6 and then recommendation 8.

So, recommendation 6 speaks about asking the Government to consider introducing a programme of investment to improve physical activity facilities in existing schools. Now, all of us will have visited schools in our own constituencies and regions where, for example, the space that is used for physical activity indoors is also the space that's used for meals, is also very often a space that's used for overspill classrooms—this is particularly true in primary schools. Now, the Welsh Government's response to that recommendation—and, of course, we know this as a committee— says this is a matter for local authorities. Well, of course it's a matter for local authorities, but the committee's evidence was clear that local authorities are not making that necessary investment in those schools outside the twenty-first century schools programme, and that's precisely why we've asked the Government to do something about it. Now, of course the Government's pot isn't full, of course we know that there's a lot of pressure, but surely this is absolutely crucial. And I would urge the Government to look again at their rejection of that recommendation. If local authorities could, or were willing, to put that right, they would've done it already, and they either can't or they haven't.

And to turn again, then, to recommendation 8 and the Government's refusal to accept the need to legislate for 120 minutes of physical activity as a minimum, now, I do understand what the Government has said in terms of the new curriculum, by its very nature, being less prescriptive, and, as a former teacher myself, I absolutely welcome that. But I've read the Government's response in great detail, and it really isn't clear to me how anything that they're proposing to do is going to make the difference that is needed. We know that physical activities get squeezed. In the early years, as I've said, there may not be the skills in the teaching and support workforce; there may not be the physical space. With older pupils, there will be that pressure of exams. Now, again, hopefully the new curriculum will lift some of that, but there's that pressure of exams and there's that pupil reluctance, particularly in the case of girls and young women.

I am just not convinced, and I don't think anybody else who's read the evidence would be convinced, that the Government's approach is going to prevent this. So, if the route is not to legislate for 120 minutes, we need to have another way of making sure that that activity time is somehow protected, and I'd be grateful to hear more from the Government today about how they propose to do that.

To close, Deputy Presiding Officer, there can be nothing more important than our children's physical health; the whole of their future depends on it, their ability to learn academically, their ability to grow into exactly the kind of citizens that the new curriculum describes us wanting to create. What we cannot have around this very important agenda is complacency and apathy.