Health Promotion Bill [HL]

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 2nd December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I refer my interests as set out in the register. I congratulate my noble friend in sport, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on securing this debate and introducing a Bill that seeks to take forward one of the main recommendations from the House of Lords National Plan for Sport and Recreation Committee. The noble Lord has made a strong case for the measures contained in his Bill, which builds on then Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s commitment that the new office for health promotion, which began work earlier this year, should tackle the causes, not just the symptoms, of poor health and improve prevention of illness and disease.

As we have heard in earlier deliberations on the subject in your Lordships’ House, the then Minister, my noble friend Lord Kamall, who did an excellent job in government, emphasised the Government’s commitment to developing a national plan for sport and physical activity, informing the House that it would be published “later this year”. As he would agree, and indeed accepted very honestly in his contribution just now, we are fast running out of time. One reason, which the committee recognised, is that, departmentally, sport lies on the fringes of the Whitehall machinery. The case for sport and recreation to be moved to the Department for Health and Social Care has once again, this year, demonstrated that we need a concerted, co-ordinated and cross-departmental effort, placing sport and recreation at the centre of a proactive health policy. The benefits are clear to your Lordships, but that has sadly withered on the political vine.

We may have hosted a great Olympic Games in 2012, yet we have not, beyond even the imaginations of the most optimistic observers, been able to deliver a sports legacy for this country. One-third of the adult population receive less than two and a half hours of moderate activity per week and schoolchildren face unprecedented levels of obesity and inactivity, with PE marginalised and woefully inadequate primary school training for teachers—less than three hours in a three-year course. That has all combined to the point where the chair of our sport and recreation committee, the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, concluded in this House that we have become

“one of the most lazy, inactive nations in the modern world.”—[Official Report, 4/2/22; col. 1208.]

So I would like to put a number of questions to my noble friend the Minister today. I accept that he is not responsible for enacting the outcome of these questions, but it is an opportunity for the House to hear the reasons why we continue to slip further behind countries around the world in promoting participation in sport. None of us is talking about elite sport; we are talking about participation. It is there where we need to develop measures to ensure that sport and recreation facilities operate as safe and non-discriminatory environments. We need a healthier, more proactive population, yet we have dropped the clear benefits of implementing the Prime Minister of the day’s full commitment to establishing an office for health promotion, to place prevention through an active lifestyle in all its connotations at the centre of our approach to the National Health Service.

I therefore ask the Minister: what work has been undertaken by the DfE to increase the number of schools making physical activity facilities available to communities after school, at weekends and during the school holidays through the opening of school facilities programmes? How many schools have built closer and reciprocal links with local, grass-roots sports clubs? Where is the physical activity facilities strategy, capable of improving everyone’s access to opportunities to be active? Can the Minister report on whether we have doubled the Sport England local delivery pilots this year —or can he at least indicate what progress has been made on this fund? Have the Government moved forward with the healthy schools rating scheme, strengthening the physical activity elements, improving the response rate and increasing its visibility and use among schools?

Does the Minister agree that the DfE should pursue a six-sports pledge to promote the ambition that all children experience at least six different types of sport and physical activity through curriculum PE, extracurricular and out-of-school provision? Why did the Government drop the idea of introducing a summer activity challenge, linked to schools and holiday provision, and creating a 10-week summer activity programme this year and beyond for every school child, not just the enthusiasts? What additional active travel interventions have been delivered this year to promote health and well-being in society as a whole?

What is the current status of social prescribing—admirably referred to by my noble friend—and how successful have the pilots been? Is it the intention to roll these out nationally, because they should be? What is the current level of cycling training programmes for children, which was announced over a year ago? Has Bikeability reached its objective of widening participation from its baseline of 60%? What has been done to embed active design principles into national planning guidance as part of the review of the National Planning Policy Framework?

These are just a few of the vitally important areas that my noble friend in sport—as I always refer to him—the noble Lord, Lord Addington, seeks to embed in his legislation into the office for health promotion’s activities. Can the Minister report why sport and recreation are still on the fringes of government? Why has this portfolio not been moved to a department of state, in this case the Department of Health and Social Care, and why are we destined to reflect that, despite the cross-party support in your Lordships’ House, we meet today, 10 years on from the hugely successful London Olympic and Paralympic Games, having failed to take forward a true sports legacy?

The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is not only necessary but signals to the Government the need to act—if it is not already far too late. I wish my noble friend the Minister well in persuading his colleagues and ensuring that the current Government deliver on the undertaking that Prime Minister Boris Johnson publicly welcomed.