Thank you, Peter, for bringing this Bill to the floor of the Senedd. In my view, we cannot deliver a healthier, greener and more equal Wales unless we address the inequalities of our relationship with food. Everyone in Wales should have the right to good, fresh food. Sadly, that is not happening at the moment. All around us, we can see diabetes, heart disease, cancer epidemics—all evidence of our unhealthy relationship with food.

I was constantly in dialogue in the previous Senedd with the education Minister on how we can change the quality of school meals, which, supposedly, is the duty of school governors to inspect and also to report on in the school report. But, sadly, next to no governors are even aware that they have this duty, never mind being in compliance, and Estyn does not regard it as a core part of their duty. So, it is symptomatic of the lack of rigour in our whole-system approach to this matter.

Yes, there are many wonderful initiatives going on to improve our food system. Food Cardiff has achieved the silver Sustainable Food Places award, the school holiday enrichment programme has been a fantastic programme, and I very much appreciate that the Welsh Government has doubled the budget for that in the last summer holidays, but I'm afraid to say that it did not, in the case of my schools, lead to more people taking it up. It actually led to fewer schools taking it up, and I understand that, because schools are exhausted after having to keep teaching during the pandemic. But nevertheless it is illustrative that we simply do not have buy-in from all parties all around. Far too many schools think that the school meal is an add-on to the school day—something for the free school mealers and a few others, rather than central to pupils' well-being.

We have to bear in mind that obesity levels double between the start of primary school and when children go on to secondary school. That is a really stunning statistic. I am really disappointed that Wales continues to have no schools that are signatories to the Food for Life accreditation, which means that not only do schools not pay sufficient attention to the importance of school meals, but they don't even know where the food comes from, because there is nobody actually monitoring that. So, we did have, in Flintshire, a pioneer of adopting the Food for Life accreditation, which obviously rewards people for increasing the amount of fresh food that they deliver, increasing the amount of organic food that they deliver, and if Oldham, a very poor local authority, can do it, why can't Wales?

So, I have to say that whilst I am not a fan of a food commission, I am much more in favour of tracking the way we use the public money that we should be controlling and should be ensuring the quality of, not just in our school meals, but in all our care homes, in all our hospitals, and just generally ensuring that people have fresh food available for them and that they know how to cook it, because sadly that is also part of the problem.

So, I had one question for Peter Fox, which is, really: how do you think we are going to be able to strengthen food labelling requirements? Because this is something the UK Government has faffed around on, talked a lot about, but not actually done anything about. This is something that, really, we do need to have as a UK-wide thing, because just simply having different food labelling in Wales would lead to a huge additional cost to people's food bills in Wales. You really do need to work with the UK Government on this one. We cannot go on having sugar and salt in baby food, for a start, and also the constant pressure from big food, which acts just like big tobacco, to ensure that children are adopting the bad habits from day one. They spend billions of pounds trying to tell people what they should be eating, and instead we have the fantastic Veg Power, but a 2.3 per cent increase in the consumption of fresh vegetables as a result of that fantastic campaign is just not going to cut the mustard. That is why I do think that all departments within Government need to be really focusing on this matter, because, otherwise, we'll not just be spending 50 per cent of the budget on the NHS, we'll be spending three quarters of the budget on the NHS and having a very miserable existence with it.