The Ramblers' Association gives four steps to get Britain walking, following announcement on anti-obesity strategy.
The national walking charity the Ramblers’ Association (RA) today have strongly welcomed new targets to get Britain out walking as part of a national Government anti obesity strategy, and called on the Government to follow four key footsteps towards implementing the walking scheme.
The proposed ‘Walking into Health programme’, which aims to get a third of England walking at least 1,000 more steps daily by 2012, is part of a Cross Government Strategy to combat obesity, announced by the Department of Health today.
Keith Roberts, Head of Campaigns at the RA comments: “Currently 70% of the population don’t get enough physical exercise, often because they can’t build an expensive and time consuming gym schedule into their daily lives.
“Walking is the cheapest and most accessible form of activity known to humankind. It takes just 30 minutes a day, 5 times a week to stay fit and people can easily build it into their daily lives. It must be a key part of any anti-obesity campaign that plans to encompass the whole population.”
Currently the RA is running a range of lottery funded 12 week ‘Get Walking, Keep Walking’ urban walking projects in London and Birmingham. These programmes target people from communities who might not normally build walking into their daily lives. There are plans to expand the project over the next year.
Keith comments:
“We look forward to working with Government, Local Authorities, the NHS and our fellow voluntary and non-governmental organisations in contributing to successful actions for this essential strategy.”
Four Footsteps to get Britain walking
1. To ensure the provision of safe, accessible, convenient and attractive public space and infrastructure for walking in urban and rural contexts.
2. To engage and invest in promotion of walking to a wide range of audiences and communities. This includes the most vulnerable and most deprived who suffer disproportionately from ill health, using social marketing and behaviour change campaigns, innovative and effective community projects and imaginative and accessible information provision, working through a range of agencies including community groups, the voluntary sector and the NHS .
3. To encourage the participation of all sorts of people walking in all sorts of contexts for all sorts of benefits, including: physical and mental health, and the wider well being agenda; social cohesion; sustainable transport, to name just a few.
4. To ensure effective partnerships across national, regional and local government and particularly joined up approaches between the Departments for Health, Communities and Local Government and transport, local authorities and NHS trusts, and government and the voluntary sector including major walking charities like the Ramblers’ Association, Government and third sector organisations.
For more information please contact the RA’s Press Office on 0207 339 8531/32
www.ramblers.org.uk or press@ramblers.org.uk
