Lynne Neagle AM: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. We've received apologies for absence from Michelle Brown and Jack Sargeant; there are no substitutions. Can I ask if Members have any declarations of interest, please? No. Okay. We'll move on, then, to item 2, which is our scrutiny of the 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' draft strategy, and I'm very pleased to welcome Dr Frank Atherton, the Chief Medical Officer for Wales, and Nathan Cook, who is the head of the healthy and active branch at Welsh Government. Thank you, both, for attending this morning. We're very much looking forward to hearing what you've got to say. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions. If I can just start by asking about the fact that 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' is an all-age strategy, really, and how confident you are that it will deliver for children and young people.
Dr Frank Atherton: Well, we're very confident. I mean, it has to, quite clearly. We do need to think about the present generation, the problems faced by the current generation. We have high prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults—we know that, and we can't walk away from that because that's translating into demand on health services. But we have to take a focus, a future generation's focus, almost, on the next generation. I don't write off the current generation, we can't afford to do that, but we do need to think about what can we do that would be different for the next generation so that they don't get into the sorts of problems that we're currently seeing with overweight and obesity. We know that the consequences of that for our young people are going to be enormous if we don't do something and something quite soon. We know that overweight children go on to become overweight adults, unfortunately, and that brings all the consequences of multiple disease issues—diabetes is often cited—cancer risk et cetera. So, we have to focus on children, and, in fact, during the consultation, we've been very clear that we need to engage with children and young people as well. Perhaps we'll get into that at some point, Chair, but, yes, I can give you that assurance.
Lynne Neagle AM: Okay, thank you. What my follow-up question, really, is: can you just tell us what kind of engagement you've had with children and young people to inform the draft strategy?
Dr Frank Atherton: Well, Nathan may be able to influence some of the detail, but in broad terms, we have discussed with young people in a number of fora. In fact, I was delighted that we had a young person, Evie Morgan, a schoolgirl from mid Wales, who came to the joint launch on the consultation. She met the Minister there and gave a very good personal account of her views on obesity and overweight. We've been visiting a number of schools during the consultation process. I'm visiting a school, either this week or next week, at Treorchy, to talk with teachers and young people there. Obviously, we're hopeful that schools and young people will contribute to the consultation as well. So, we've had quite good input, I would say, from children and young people. There is always more we can do we and we want to hear those voices.
Nathan Cook: I was going to say, we've also had a session with youth ambassadors as well, and what we've actually produced for the consultation is not just the children and young people's version, but also a toolkit in terms of getting schools really engaged and involved in terms of the work that we want them to do to feed into this as well. So, we've already had some really good responses from a lot of youth group and schools already.