Health Promotion Bill [HL]

Earl of Devon Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 2nd December 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks and congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on bringing forward this Health Promotion Bill, encapsulating as it does many of the major recommendations of the National Plan for Sport and Recreation Committee. I was privileged to be a member of that committee from January 2021 until the publication of the report almost exactly a year ago.

Having revisited the report in preparation for today, I note how increasingly urgent its recommendations have become. As the ravages of long Covid scourge the nation, putting ever greater numbers on long-term sick leave, as the cost of living crisis and food inflation put a healthy diet out of reach for more and more families, as the cold chill of winter takes grip, with fuel prices skyrocketing, and as access to the NHS becomes ever more inaccessible, the health and well-being of our nation has never been more important. As living standards crumble before our eyes in the face of national and global headwinds, we need to build our resilience. This Bill does just that. I therefore strongly support it and condemn the Government’s apathy, as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Kamall.

I note my interests as listed in the appendix to the report and offer my huge thanks to the witnesses who contributed evidence during those dark and Zoomful days of the pandemic, among them schoolchildren, sports coaches, academics and even the odd world political leader. We were excellently chaired and extensively chivvied by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, wisely advised by Dr Mackintosh and energetically enabled by the dedicated team of Michael, Katie and Hannah. I thank them all.

The office for health promotion must sit within the Department of Health and Social Care and have responsibility for the national plan for sport. DCMS has for too long championed sport in this country as commercial high-end entertainment. As the football Premier League has shown, the UK has achieved unparalleled success in the highly leveraged global super-leagues of sport, but it has made us no healthier as a nation. It has made footballers and overseas club owners wealthier, but the nation is no fitter.

Just look at rugby union, a sport I once played at the dawn of the professional era. Its leading clubs are once more going bankrupt, it has brutalised its workforce through excess physicality and it has detached from its grass roots in pursuit of an audience and TV revenues. Even the legacy-laden London Olympics saw only a per cent or two increase in sports participation, while the numbers of those volunteering, coaching or officiating in sports actually declined.

This trickle-down approach to health promotion through sport has simply not worked. It is at local, community level that focus and funding must be directed. Physical literacy must be on a par with reading and maths, teachers and schools must be equipped to facilitate such learning and school fields and sports halls must be funded and treated as key community infrastructure, not locked and left to idle. Local travel must be active; close to two-thirds of Dutch children cycle to school, compared to only 3% of English children. Their weather is no better than ours, but their cycle paths are. We must also remember that sport and physical activity need not be competitive. We must not fetishise winning at all costs over participation and the inclusion of all in physical activity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, noted.

I was proud to bring a Devonian voice to the committee and was keen to highlight rural access, one of the favourite provisions of the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Farmers and land managers must be funded and encouraged to provide wider access to our countryside and all the physical and mental well-being that can be obtained therefrom. Wordsworth knew its worth. However, this access must not cost our biodiversity or the provision of healthy, nutritious food. That means it needs to be consensual, planned and permitted access, delivered in concert with local communities.

Rural land management is undergoing a generational upheaval. We must harness the well-being opportunity through social prescribing, environmental land management, proper planning and transportation reforms, all of which need to be coherently co-ordinated. This excellent Bill might just achieve this, so I recommend it to your Lordships’ House. In light of the completion yesterday of the Government’s ELMS review, can the Minister provide any detail on the funding and support for public access and social prescribing under the newly regilded environmental land management scheme?