Meeting of the Parliament 18 January 2017
I will come to that.
Out in the garden at the nursery of my youngest, the children had their own vegetable patch in which they planted, tended and grew their own vegetables. They would harvest them and bring them in to the cook, who served them up for dinner. Guess what vegetables my daughter now eats?
By the time that children get to primary school, they have the basic movement patterns to move on to active games. Kids need to be active every day. One key element that I would like the Parliament to explore is how we can enable our children to safely cycle, walk, skateboard and scoot to school. Being active pre-class has a positive impact on attention, behaviour, learning capacity and, ultimately, attainment. Consider this: reading and writing are physical activities. If that physical literacy path is followed when our children reach secondary school age, activity should be the norm, and they should have a choice in what activities and sports they are most likely to participate in.
Closing the health inequality gap means ensuring that activity is accessible to all. Currently, too many children have to go home first and then go somewhere else, yet the facilities are at school. That is the point at which we can make the biggest impact on health inequality and eliminate barriers to inclusion: create a policy that means that schools remain open after school hours for activities and sport, and make it easy to be active.
Sport and diet have a symbiotic relationship. When a person is active, they are much more likely to have better eating habits. If we look at preventable cancers, we see that smoking, obesity, a lack of fruit and vegetables, and drinking alcohol are major contributors to an increased cancer risk. If a person participates in sport, the likelihood is that they will not smoke, their weight will be under control, they will drink less alcohol, and their diet will be healthier. Sport is a key driver.
A major delivery mechanism for activity resides in the third sector, where volunteers at clubs and organisations engage with communities daily. That gives opportunities for inclusivity and activity. Tackling health inequality should involve recognising and investing more in the volunteer sector.
I point out that the badge that I am wearing was made for me last Monday by the 21st Ayrshire cubs. I promised them that I would wear it and give those boys and girls a name check.
Yesterday, I attended the sports policy conference, at which I heard the Minister for Public Health and Sport talk about the high importance that the Scottish Government places on sport, the positive impact that sport has on the health and wellbeing of the nation, and the need to quicken the pace of improvement. That is all very laudable. However, at a time when the sports spend is 0.1 per cent of the Scottish Government’s budget, how can she and her Government reconcile those words with the proposed £4 million slashing of the sports budget, the withdrawing of funds from jogscotland, which has 40,000 weekly participants, 80 per cent of whom are women and 70 per cent of whom are from inactive backgrounds—I am talking about a £100,000 investment, which equates to £2.50 per person per year—or the withdrawing of funding that allowed every primary school child free swimming lessons? Some 15,000 children now go to secondary school unable to swim. Apart from anything else, that is inherently dangerous.
The actions just do not match the rhetoric. That is just not good enough, and it is time to step up and take preventable health problems seriously.