Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:19 pm on 22 October 2019.
I'd like to thank Dr Lloyd for the interesting sermon and lecture. I agree with most of what he says. There is agreement on where we are and what we want to try and do. Rather than trading some facts and figures about what we’re doing and investing in active travel and that in the strategy as well, I think it’s just important to reflect and to recognise that the points that you make about smoking are of real interest, because the legislative change helped to move things on with a broader change taking place at different levels within different parts of the country. But it led to wider-spread cultural change, in particular people’s attitudes around smoking around children, and smoking around food as well. You still see that carrying on. You are suddenly seeing a wider shift in attitudes, and, as you know, I agree with you on minimum unit pricing—that’s why I took through the minimum unit pricing legislation in this place. I think we'll see a similar impact here, not just a reduction in the amount of alcohol but the amount of high strength and very cheap alcohol that is consumed as well.
So, in the strategy, we do set out that we do, as I said to Angela, want to test the limits of our powers—the powers we currently have, for example the powers available to us in the Public Health (Wales) Act 2017 we passed in the last Assembly term, as well as looking in that delivery plan to have future options for legislation, to set out how we might use powers that are available to us in terms of our competence to set up the legislation to allow us to do so as well. Because there are things to think about in terms of advertising and promotion. And then some of that is difficult, because we have some people who raise income in different ways at present. If you think about healthy vending, it's part of what we see within the health service, but also in leisure centres too as well. We don't run those directly, and yet I can tell you, when I take my son swimming, as I do regularly, and he's got far too much energy, as most five-year-old children do, but it's great—except, we finish swimming and we sit down to put our shoes on and we're sat in front of a vending machine that is full of chocolate. My son's five, and he sees a bag full of chocolate and he says, 'Daddy, can I have some chocolate?' So, I have to tell him 'no', so I end up being a bit like bad dad, but I'm doing the right thing. So, there's something about how we change the environment so you're not having those different and mixed messages. Because if I tell him, 'This is a treat', then every time he goes around to try and do the right thing, that is there in front of him. That's part of what we need to see a shift and change in as well.
Just finally, on your point about walking, for those of us who have jobs here, this job is not great for physical activity. I regularly walk from the basement up to the fifth floor, because often it is the only exercise I'll get in the day. Otherwise, I'm sat on my backside talking or stood on my feet talking—not a great deal of exercise. So, there is a challenge about our working environment, and not just us in this place, but people who work in office jobs. There are a range of jobs we now undertake in more modern economies that are not physically active in the way that lots of people would have gone to work and had to earn a living in the past. There is a challenge about what we choose to do in a workplace to make it more physically active, but also, then, about what we choose to do in our time outside of work as well. So, big system shift behaviour change is part of what we want to see, and as you say, and I'm glad you recognise, it isn't all about the Government, it is about all the choices that we make together.