Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will (a) make an assessment of the potential merits of engaging older people in a daily active mile and (b) take steps to provide opportunities for such activity.

There are no plans to make a specific assessment. The United Kingdom Chief Medical Officers’ physical activity guidelines recommend that adults, including those aged 65 and over, should aim to be physically active every day and accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week. Moderate intensity physical activity means getting the heart rate up and breathing faster. This can include brisk walking.

The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’s (OHID) ‘Better Health’ programme offers a number of free, accessible and evidence-based resources to support adults and young people to be more active. This includes the NHS Active 10 app, which encourages adults to incorporate brisk walking into their days to improve their general health and wellbeing without the need for gyms or expensive fitness programmes. The app supports and motivates users to increase and monitor the intensity of their walking, rather than just focus on the distance or number of steps throughout the day. Just 10 minutes of brisk walking a day is an easy way for adults to introduce more moderate intensity physical activity into their day.

To support more individuals to reach a brisk walking pace and to achieve moderate intensity activity, OHID have just launched a new feature within the NHS Active 10 app, called ‘Pace Checker’. The feature helps walkers to find their brisk walking pace of 100 or more steps per minute, and motivates them to complete more Active 10s every day.