Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. As the motion highlights, Wales has the highest prevalence of diabetes in western Europe. It currently gobbles up 10 per cent of our NHS budget—that's £950 million of next year's health budget.

This debate isn't about type 1 diabetes, a complex medical condition that normally hits young people in adolescence, the triggers for which are complex and not linked to diet. The rates of type 1 diabetes remain largely unchanged from year to year. Type 2 diabetes is another matter. This debate is about the veritable epidemic of type 2 diabetes: over 200,000 people already diagnosed, many more undiagnosed, and even those diagnosed predicted to rise to over 300,000 people by 2030, unless we do something about it.

Wales has over 0.5 million people who are overweight or obese, who are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. And let's face it, that problem can only have got worse as a result of the lockdown, as we've all eaten more than we should. But the most sobering fact is that one third of all the people who have died of COVID have also had diabetes. So, what can we do about this, and what can we do to prevent people getting diabetes in the first place?

Wales is the only country in Britain not to have a national diabetes prevention programme. England has one, Scotland has one, but not Wales. And as the most obese nation in Europe, that seems to me careless, imprudent, and urgently needs to change, particularly when we have a cost-effective, award-winning, made-in-Wales solution on our doorstep. A brief intervention piloted in the Afan valley by a cluster of nine GP practices, in collaboration with nutritionists at Swansea Bay University Health Board and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, has been run for over three years and has been trawled all over by Swansea University's Swansea Centre for Health Economics to make sure that the numbers stack up.

It's cost effective because the patients are identified by their GP practice who are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and they never need to go anywhere near a hospital in order to get this intervention, and, in the context of all the problems we're going to have with waiting lists for people who need hospital treatment, that's a very important fact. It's also very effective, because it's delivered by non-medical practice staff who've been specially trained by dieticians in nutrition skills, and that makes it easy to roll out across the country. It's cost effective because the brief intervention consists of exercise, dietary advice and information sheets, and costs a mere £44 per patient. If you compare that to the English intervention, run by specialist experts, that costs £240 to £290 per patient. It's also entirely cost effective because nearly two thirds of the people taking part in this programme did not go on to get diabetes. So, Swansea University has calculated that rolling out this programme nationally would save each health board over £6 million per year, and that's not counting the personal benefits to the patient of not getting diabetes and not running the risk of loss of sight, loss of limbs and early death. 

Little wonder, then, that the Afan valley brief intervention programme won the UK-wide Quality In Care diabetes award last year. This really is prudent healthcare in action. What is stopping us rolling it out? It has the multidisciplinary approach to a chronic disease where, unfortunately, we're top of the league tables for the whole of Europe. How can we afford not to be doing this? I hope therefore to hear that this is a very high priority for the Minister, given the very high numbers of people who are at risk of type 2 diabetes, and the serious implications arising from this disease.