Peter Corrigan: That video-game present - it's a real killer

Never before in the long history of yuletide celebrations have so many children been fatter than Father Christmas. The number of kids suffering from obesity has reached a level even the Government has noticed, and it is as a result of its study issued on Thursday that we are contemplating this and other disturbing statistics about the state of the nation's health and fitness. Whether by accident or design, this is an appropriate time to consider these matters, because each Christmas seems to spur us to take bone idleness to new heights, and Santa is likely to be among the least surprised.

He would have deduced part of the problem from the contents of his sack. Whereas it once bulged with sporting implements like football boots, rugby balls, tennis rackets and cricket bats it is now full of video games and other technological trickery that absorb the passions of the young to the detriment of their limbs, lungs and hearts. It is not a phenomenon confined to the young, of course; a distressingly high number of adults have gone, or are proceeding rapidly, to seed at an early age. No doubt our freedom to become fat slobs if we wish is enshrined in some European edict or other, but the Government seems determined to attack a sedentary approach to life that every year sends 54,000 of us to a premature grave and imposes an annual £2 billion on our health bill.

The study, which was conducted by Downing Street's strategy unit and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, didn't flinch from comparing our woeful record in keeping fit with that of other European countries – participation levels in Finland, for instance, are twice as high – and pledged to tackle the problem by introducing new goals.

In schools, where the neglect has been shameful, they plan for 75 per cent of children to receive at least two hours of exercise per week at school by 2006. This does not seem a particularly adventurous target, particularly as in the 1970s children received five hours of games lessons a week.

What happens to the other 25 per cent? Do they carry on getting fat and contributing to the disgraceful obesity figures? Ten per cent of children starting primary school are classed as "alarmingly overweight" and that figure swells to 15 per cent among school-leavers.

The British Heart Foundation reports that a third of under-sevens fail to reach the minimum recommended activity levels. By the age of 15, two thirds of girls are so indolent as to be considered inactive. The medical implications of those figures makes this a dangerous generation of which to be part.

Admittedly, it is easy for older generations to criticise. We were brought up in more austere times, when food was more scarce and when there was little television to distract us from playing games. The surfeit of modern temptations merely helps to explain the cause of the problem, it doesn't soften its severity.

And if our schools aren't playing their part, the picture becomes even worse afterwards. Seventy per cent of 16-year-olds forgo physical activity altogether when they leave school.

The long-term strategy to tackle the older couch potatoes envisages persuading three-quarters of the population to spend 30 minutes a day, five days a week, on activities ranging from walking to waxing the car. Hardly dynamic, but it would be a help.

No lasting improvement, however, is possible unless we get schools back to the old rations of PE that were destroyed in the Seventies and Eighties by a series of dumb-headed acts: the selling-off of 5,000 school playing-fields; introducing contracted hours that dissuaded teachers from supervising sport outside school hours; and the decrying of competitive sport by unhinged educationalists.

Added to those insanities was the fashion of smartarses and eggheads to denounce school sport because of the torture they had suffered on the wallbars and the galloping goosepimples they encountered on draughty pitches. Some of us would have been just as tormented by maths and chemistry, but we had to buckle down, and that's what a rounded education should be about.

There's much anti-sport baggage to be shifted before we can even begin to redress the balance, but the Government's decision to try is to be loudly applauded. If some of us are sceptical it is because we've learnt to wait for the delivery to match the promise. This Government has proved to be far more efficient at highlighting problems than solving them but, unlike its predecessors, it appears to have a much firmer grasp on the realities of the problem.

I can speak with some knowledge and frustration on the subject because often during the past 20 years I have tried to suggest that sport has a much bigger contribution to make to the nation than a mere diversion, that it can make us fitter, healthier and more fulfilled and give the disadvantaged young a life in which crime is not the only available adventure.

But as our interest, obsessive at times, in the fortunes of our top international and club teams has grown enormously our participation levels have been allowed to drop, particularly in the schools. By the mid-Eighties it was obvious that drastic action was necessary, but little was done by the Thatcher government.

In 1985 a delegation from the major sports met one of her ministers to express their anxiety about what was happening to school sport. They warned, I wrote at the time, "of the dangerously sedentary future facing the generation now at school". Prophetic or what?

Before the general election of 1987, when Dennis Howell was still their sports spokesman, Labour included 21 sports-related items in their manifesto. The Conservatives barely mentioned the subject; an omission that did not prevent them winning the election.

Any chance of a profound change was ruined when sport was deliberately elbowed out of the national curriculum in the early 1990s. In 1995, John Major launched an initiative to restore sports to the centre of school life. It was the same time that he envisaged a British Academy of Sport. That didn't happen either. When Labour eventually took over in 1997, Howell had gone and so had much of the sporting impetus. The Blair government has continued to recognise the importance of sport. In 2000, the Prime Minister himself spoke of the vital part sport can play in cutting down crime and truancy – a view backed by solid facts – but we are still only now getting to grips with the problem, or hope we are.

What makes the delay harder to forgive is that for the last eight years we have had the benefit of the Lottery proceeds. That is the saddest aspect of the deplorable state of sport in this country. No country can surely have had more opportunity to invest in its sports and social fabric. Even allowing for the £3.6bn the Treasury is scandalously still hoarding, we have not used the cash to best effect.

We remain short of swimming pools and inner-city facilities, and there has been a deliberate policy of directing grants away from the human element. To make the plans work we have to invest in people, in the physical educationalists who offer the only sure way of restoring enthusiasm and accomplishment to school sport.

An army of sports co-ordinators are alleged to be on their way to the schools, but so much depends on the co-operation and goodwill of the teachers that they must be the first to be enrolled in this crusade, and well rewarded for their efforts.

Although the effect of sport on the well-being of the nation was its main priority, the study ranged over a wider area, including funding of high-profile sports, the reduction in sporting bureaucracy and the hosting of big sporting events.

I was pleased to see that caution was urged about the proposed London 2012 Olympics bid. There are those who say that a bid would assist our sporting infrastructure, but it would most certainly be a distraction from the massive task the Government has set itself.