Covid-19: Children

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for this opportunity to discuss the case for the urgent levelling up of opportunities available to children. She made an impassioned speech and I would argue that it resonated across the House. People want change and they are ready for it. Yes, the boxes for many component parts of children’s policies can be ticked, but the evidence that they are connected is missing. Sadly, the delivery structures are not in place to ensure successful cross-departmental connection.

Ticking boxes, as the noble Baroness stated, is not a big enough action. She invited the Government to be bold, and I share that conviction. We have indeed come to terms with the digital economy, but why should the digital economy increase the divide rather than reducing it? We work in Whitehall and Westminster where the structures are outdated; they are not fit for the challenges and, more importantly, the priorities of today, which is why the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, brought to our attention the work of the office for health promotion, which comes into operation this September, bringing together all the strands of government policy that are essential for a cross-departmental children’s policy. It can, it should, it must.

At the moment we pursue a silo approach to many opportunities for children in education, health and welfare, not least in the world of sport and physical activity, which is still embedded in 20th-century structures. This silo mentality depends on whether your responsibility is elite sport, community sport or school sport, with all too little emphasis on health and well-being. That magnifies connectivity problems and demonstrates the vital need for cross-departmental and cross-activity engagements for children, and we need to level up.

The Health Foundation has indicated that young people are experiencing ongoing economic and social impacts that present a risk to their long-term health and well-being. The pandemic, as we all know, has caused huge disruption to young people’s education. During the first lockdown, secondary school pupils had four and a half hours a day of learning compared with six and a half hours before the pandemic. Gaps in education have not been experienced equally: there has been much more lost learning in schools with higher levels of deprivation than in private schools.

For all schoolchildren, the road to normality has been characterised by squeezing out recreation and a healthy active lifestyle, both physical and mental, at the expense of the understandable pressures today on academic studies. I ask the Minister whether in the levelling-up White Paper there is a focus on a strategy to improve sport, health and physical activity. Do the Government recognise the importance of the office for health promotion in the context of this debate?

We face an obesity crisis greater than ever witnessed before in the United Kingdom. We face children with mental health challenges on an unprecedented scale. We need to address this crisis of inactivity and poor well-being in our young people with a national well-being strategy, backed by a national well-being budget. We need to transform physical literacy and the well-being outcomes of the PE curriculum, and we need a comprehensive review and modernisation of teacher training in this context. Here I strongly support those who are calling for a physical activity guarantee, for a weekly after-school active lifestyle guarantee for every child, and for a guaranteed million hours of sport volunteering. As Professor Doherty, who leads a team of researchers at the University of Oxford studying physical activity and well-being, said:

“We support a national plan that would encourage people of all ages to become more active, less sedentary and improve their cardiovascular fitness to benefit their physical and brain health.”


We missed the first chance of a legacy for children from London 2012. We now have a second chance. Much has been made of the lack of effective co-ordination across all government departments involved in the need to address levelling-up opportunities for children. Often the problem is not policy effectiveness but a failure to deliver policies efficiently across government. For children, that requires a deep dive into the existing structures, divisional, cross-departmental and in terms of political accountability.

The fundamental problem is that the overlap between departmental responsibilities reflects far-reaching changes in expectation in society, which the structure of departmental responsibilities fails to reflect. Local authorities and partnerships, leisure trusts, local sports clubs, health and care providers, and charities should and must work together. We have never had a unified voice for children and we have never needed it more, so the need for a Secretary of State with explicit responsibility for children is urgent now, to provide essential leadership with the duty to ensure that every policy is assessed through the prism of its impact on children.