4. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales'

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:26 pm on 22 October 2019.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:26, 22 October 2019

I thank the Member for the comments. It's fair to point out that with salt reformulation, a range of food businesses reduced the salt content and it had no impact on the taste that customers reported when actually having that food. The challenge is whether a voluntary approach is enough. And, as I've set out, I think we ought to test the limits of what is available to us to make a bigger difference. That's part of what I've set out, and that goes into school and food and the way that children understand the way their food is produced. And in virtually every primary school that I visit, including ones in the less well-off parts of my constituency, I see a very consistent approach to encouraging children to grow food and to understand where and how that's produced on a local level.

And I just want to deal with your points about targets, and then how we use outcomes and then some of the proposals that we have. We had a conversation about whether to have targets in this strategy, and I decided not to have targets. I looked at what is happening in Scotland and England, where they've got targets to reduce childhood obesity, to halve it by 2030, and I just don't think there's any evidence that that is an aspiration that is in any way achievable, because part of our challenge is that we don't understand yet how much of an impact the measures that we're going to try to introduce will have, and I don't particularly want an aspirational finger-in-the-wind target. I just don't think that's smart or sensible for anyone. The outcome framework that we're going to produce will allow people to measure what impact is being had upon the population of Wales. So, if there is no change, then the outcome measures will track that. If there is real change, we'll see that and we'll then need to try and understand which ones of our interventions are having the most significant impacts. We can't always tell which intervention we introduce affects people's lives and what the direct correlation is in terms of how healthy a weight the country has.

In terms of some of the proposals, it may be helpful to set out that we are looking at a ban on the sale of energy drinks to children; restricting the promotion and marketing of unhealthy food and drink in the retail environment; to ban the sale of refillable sugary drinks in out-of-home settings—and we regularly see those, the endless refills; to restrict the size of a sugary soft drink; and mandatory calorie labelling in out-of-home settings; and to explore options to restrict access to the promotion of unhealthy food and drink accessible to schoolchildren. So, there is a range of specific measures we are looking at and I'll come forward with more specific proposals in the future.