Very few people will have heard of the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund - but it is a victim of government cuts.
The Aggregates Levy is a levy on industries who dig minerals out of the ground which has essentially been hypothecated to be spent on local environmental projects.
And, yes, the RSPB benefitted from some of this money (because we sent in good bids for it) over the years. In fact we benefitted to the tune of a few million pounds over the last few years for projects on several of our nature reserves and on giving land owners advice on hethland restoration and creation. Pond Conservation's excellent Million Ponds Project and Buglife's work on saving white-clawed crayfish has also benefitted from funding through this route.
In the new era, the levy continues but the money is not hypothecated and goes straight to the Treasury where it will be spent on 'general purposes'. This, therefore, represents a move away from localism, a move away from Big Society and a move away from 'greenest government ever'.
What next? The Landfill Communities Fund?
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Sooty - see my blog tomorrow for some stuff on bustards but you really shouldn't listen to word on the street. See my blog of 2 June 2009 (that seems a long time ago - I was a relatively new blogger then) where I state that we were a bit sniffy about the great bustard project in the early days. We were. But we have been helping behind the scenes including providing funding (which I can tell you needed a certain ingenuity on my part) for several years. And what better help could we give than lead a funding bid to the EU using our resources, and not in anyway guaranteed to succeed, which delivers a large amount of funding to a project of which we are just junior partners? I don't think you'll find many close to the project complaining about that.