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Health: Obesity

I take the noble Lord’s point about the need to monitor and assess these activities to see which is the most effective. That is built into these programmes. We will be monitoring and assessing them. That is why they are often changed. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, made an interesting comment about the targets for obesity being set by a Conservative Government. I wish to make two comments on that. It was a Conservative Government who put us in the terrible position in which we found ourselves as regards school meals. It was also a Conservative Government who allowed the sale of playing fields and did not even bother to record the number of playing fields that were sold, thereby reducing the availability of playing facilities. We have steadily reduced that. The first thing we did in 1998 was to start to count the number of playing fields that were being sold.