Perhaps Dawn Porter should hold a jumble sale instead?

So 12 lucky projects get to share £7.5 million to create Nature Improvement Areas (NIA).

Unfortunately the other 64 contenders 'leave with nothing' as they say on the best game shows.

If my maths is correct each NIA will receive roughly £625,000. And this is to reverse the devasting decline in quality and loss of habitat that has been left unchecked and under funded for decades. Is this really what Professor Lawton was hoping for when he described the appalling state of our green spaces?

Is it really going to make that much of a difference?

Let's put it onto context.

The government (same government, same bunch of people) has apparently spent £750,000 on Olympic games tickets.

Just a couple of weeks ago we were told that MPs took green spaces so seriously they had decided to rent non-native fig trees for Portcullis House at a cost of £400,0000.

The Leveson Inquiry which doesn't appear to be revealing anything we don't already know cost over £850,000 in its first three months.

And I saw today that the presenter and journalist Dawn Porter raised over £7,000 for charity yesterday by holding a jumble sale yesterday.

As the environmental press has been saying, the NIA funding is 'a boost' but it does seem like the environment is being thrown a few scraps to keep quiet rather than any meaningful investment being made.

The environment - the trees, soil, grass, hedges all those things that Lawton described in his report - is the infrastructure of our world and yet we always under invest. Contrast this with HS2 which the government has already spent £200 million on and is expected to spend £1 billion before works starts.

And I don't suppose there will be too many over paid consultants benefiting from NIA funding just some modestly paid employees of NGOs who will no doubt be supported by an army of volunteers working for nothing more than their expenses.

Which reminds me, I've got an idea for that failed Back-to-Work scheme......