8. What action is the Welsh Government planning to take to tackle the underlying health inequalities that have made some citizens more vulnerable to COVID-19 than others? OQ55434

Llywydd, can I thank the Member for that very important question? The Welsh Government continues to do everything we can to address the unacceptable inequalities in health outcomes between Wales's most and least deprived communities, and as we have seen in the COVID context for the black, Asian, minority ethnic community in particular. Reducing inequality is a central ambition of 'Prosperity for All' and lies at the heart of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.

Thank you, First Minister. At the root of this problem is poor diet. We know that the food manufacturers spend billions of pounds encouraging people to eat processed food high in fat, sugar and salt, and that this obviously is not nourishing and it leads to obesity, which then leads to diabetes, heart disease and, indeed, cancer, and now COVID-19. So, I wonder what measures the Government is considering to transform the food system that is blighting our lives, not just to improve breastfeeding and weaning, but also compliance with healthy food regulations in schools and tackle the multimillion pound advertising by the food industry, which encourages people to eat the wrong things? When did you last see an advert for vegetables?

Well, Llywydd, let me agree with Jenny Rathbone that poor diet is the product of poverty, and it is families who cannot afford to buy a diet that is balanced and has the variety in it that others of us are able to take for granted that leads to obesity in those families. We are engaging a whole series of different measures to try and address that. Not all the levers are in our own hands. The UK Government carried out a consultation on advertising earlier last year, and in our contribution to that consultation, we urged the UK Government to be more mandatory in its approach, not simply to advise companies on best practice, but to require advertising not to be aimed, for example, at children or around schools. We are considering the report issued by the House of Lords Select Committee on Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment released on 6 July, called 'Hungry for change: fixing the failures in food', and that does indeed highlight a series of issues that the Member herself has just drawn to our attention. There are a number of recommendations in that report that we will want to draw on in the work that we will do here in Wales as part of our own consultation over the autumn period on the Wales food environment, which is planned by my colleague Vaughan Gething.

I thank the First Minister.