I have called on the Government to use the money raised from the new ‘sugar tax’ to fund physical activity sessions during the school holidays.

Currently nearly a third of children aged 2 to 15 are overweight or obese, according to Public Health England. The NHS says that very overweight children tend to grow to be very overweight adults, who are more likely to have health problems such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

I work with the Shine Health Academy in Sheffield who do an extraordinary job turning around the lives of obese children across Sheffield. But they are battling, with insufficient funding, against a rising tide of obesity.

Physical activity programmes that used to be available during school holidays have fallen away with the cuts in local authority funding. There could be no better use of the sugar tax than to tackle childhood obesity before it goes on to destroy lives.

You can read my Parliamentary Question and the Government’s answer here.