I'm very interested in this subject, and it's excellent that you've done this report. Regardless of your enthusiasm for team sports—football, rugby or anything else—it's vital that every child, regardless of ability or disability, gets to be able to (a) ride a bike and (b) learn to swim. Both are essential life skills in the same category as being able to cook a basic meal or tie your shoelaces. I want to put on record the wonderful work done by Pedal Power in Cardiff, for their work with disabled people. Based in Bute Park, it's not a super-output area of deprivation, but its specialist service provides pleasure and leisure to people young and old who may be unable to participate in other sport. So, it's a really important thing. 

Turning to swimming, I appreciate the money that has been made available to extend schools into community hubs, but £24 million isn't really going to resolve the problem we have with our swimming pools. It's really, really difficult to teach somebody to swim unless it's in a swimming pool, and it is much more difficult to learn to swim as an adult. So, I was particularly interested in the evidence the committee took from Swim Wales, because, brutally, if you can't swim, you may drown, and there's no shortage of spaces to do that in any of our communities. So, we have 500 pools across Wales. I hear that there are fewer of them in north Wales, but it's good that 90 per cent of them have reopened post COVID, but up to one in 10 have not. And it would be really interesting to map exactly where those pools are and whether they are in areas of deprivation. 

Just a footnote to Alun Davies: my community contains some of the poorest families in the whole of Wales; it isn't just Cyncoed and Penylan. So, one of the pools that has not yet reopened is Pentwyn pool. Cardiff Council took the decision to outsource most of its leisure centres a few years ago to a company variously called GLL—its origins are in Greenwich—or Better. Sadly, as far as the people of Pentwyn were concerned, better it definitely was not. Its staff never did any outreach to the local schools, which is one of the most obvious ways of increasing footfall, and the free swimming offer for children, funded by the Welsh Government, was not only not advertised, it was one of the best-kept secrets in Wales, and I used to have to go along in person before the long summer holidays to actually extract from them when and how families could take up the free swimming offer. It really was not an edifying experience. Better never advertised it, presumably hoping that people could get to pay again for what was supposed to have been funded by the Welsh Government, and it was only ever one hour a day at a particular time. So, when the lockdown was lifted, Better refused to reopen Pentwyn leisure centre, citing there was no business case for doing so. This pool is situated in a super-output area of deprivation, which means that most of the children living in families without a car are extremely unlikely to travel further afield to one of the pools that have reopened, because it's at least two bus rides away. I note the RCT initiative to make sure that bus routes serve leisure centres, and that's a really good thing to do, but, unfortunately, most of these families do not have the money for two bus fares any longer.

Temporarily—. I wanted to pay tribute to Steven Moates from Better, who temporarily was allowed to reopen the leisure centre to enable community and voluntary organisations to make use of its ground floor for things that they were able to self-fund. But, sadly, if only that attitude of reaching out to the community had been available earlier, we might not be in the situation we are in today. This excellent individual has now moved on to a new job, and the future of the Pentwyn leisure centre, including its swimming pool, is subject to the outcome of successful contractual negotiations between Cardiff Rugby and Cardiff Council. And this has been going on for months, and there's absolute radio silence, and I cannot know whether it's going to lead to a good outcome, but I fear the worst.

Swim Wales had warned the committee back in May that none of the currently closed pools are likely to reopen—victims of the impact of the loss of revenue from the lockdown. But I fear that most of them are in disadvantaged areas, and the picture is even more gloomy following the autumn statement on 17 November.

I think we need to really understand why it is that schools that children are leaving primary school without half of them being able to swim at all, and this is something that is so serious, because these children, as I said, can drown, and that is one of the key things that I need to understand—what we are going to do to prevent that happening.