Children and Young People: Obesity

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for tabling this debate this evening and I declare an interest as chair of ukactive and also as vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I warmly welcomed the Government’s childhood obesity strategy when it was released. It is important to talk not just about what and how much children eat, but the impact that it then has as they grow to become adults. Of course, what we eat makes a difference, but it will be no surprise that I am going to talk about what we can do in terms of physical activity. I can perhaps answer the question of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, about maintaining weight. I know that when I was an athlete, training 12 to 15 times a week, 50 weeks a year, was very good for maintaining weight. You can eat quite a lot when you train that hard, but that is not very realistic. I know now how incredibly important physical activity is for my daily life, enabling me to push my own chair and lead an independent life.

We now have the least active generation of young people for 30 years. The fittest now would be among the least fit 30 years ago and we have a generation of children who are likely to die before their parents—nobody wants that. As noble Lords will imagine, I am a strong supporter of good-quality activity in schools, but there are 168 hours in a child’s week and just two of those are devoted to physical activity. In May 2015 ukactive produced a report called Generation Inactive which revealed that half of children aged seven were failing to meet the CMO’s 60-minute daily activity guidelines and called for Government to support head teachers to take a whole-day approach to physical activity and ensure that no child was left behind in the right to a healthy and happy childhood. An inactive childhood can shorten a child’s lifespan by up to five years and lead to long-term health problems, such as type 2 diabetes and heart conditions, and those trends go into adulthood. Inactivity costs our nation £20 billion a year.

I want to draw noble Lords’ attention to ActiveMiles. It is a fantastic way of getting children active. There are many different forms and I would happily facilitate a visit for anyone who would like to see it. It is incredible; it is cheap and it transforms how young people build their own confidence and behaviour, but linked to that are important lessons on healthy eating. We have to ensure that quality is a calling card of anyone wishing to work with schools and that there is a clear and consistent way through which schools can identify what will and will not work for them. Shockingly, the Government spend more on childhood obesity—£27 billion a year—than on primary education, which costs £26 billion a year. Inactive habits are becoming increasingly entrenched among today’s children and young people and if we do not take action now it will only get worse.

This is a complex issue. We need a holistic approach in order to improve the mental, physical and nutritional health of children nationwide. So I ask the Minister, with the soft drinks levy, while it is fantastic that a number of companies are looking to change their products, has he or his department recalculated what the figures might look like, and will he guarantee money available to schools? Can he update me on the sustainability plan for the premium beyond 2019? Research by ukactive has shown that British schoolchildren are losing 80% of fitness gained during term time through “inactive summer holidays”. These findings also demonstrate that the poorest 25% of primary school children experience a drop in their fitness levels 18 times greater than the richest 25% over the school summer holidays. That is why this summer we are running a pilot in 25 schools which will look at inactivity, but also at education, holiday hunger, learning loss, personal development and, very importantly, mental health in young people.

Finally, I would like Her Majesty’s Government to consider how we measure our children. We do it in literacy and numeracy, but a slim child does not automatically mean a fit and healthy child. We should measure children’s fitness. I am not talking about sticking a child on a treadmill and making them do a V0₂ test: I did that when I was an athlete and it is horrible. It is not about that but about actually understanding the starting point for our children. I believe that the Government should extend the national child measurement programme to measure cardiorespiratory fitness and examine data from Sport England’s active lives survey, which monitors children’s attitudes towards their health and fitness, in addition to the current measurement of BMI. While being informed by academic expertise and rigour, this should be developed in a way that is fun, inspiring and engaging for young people, with young people themselves central to its design, as opposed to people speaking on their behalf. That is why I was delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, had voices of children tonight: we need to understand what children want.

The group ukactive is currently working on a number of policies to address childhood inactivity and has recently launched a major new consultation. We will be reporting on that later in the year. It is not too late to change the opportunities that we give young people and help to produce a better life expectancy, but we have to do something now.