Number 10 excitedly announced this week that Australian businesses have committed to making £28.5bn of new investments in the UK. It seems that having foreigners snap up British assets is back in vogue.

While new money flowing into the economy is to be welcomed, such pledges should always be treated with a touch of scepticism, especially when, as the Prime Minister did, they are dressed up as “Global Britain in action” – whatever that might mean.

Sure enough, top of the pile is the commitment by Australian investment firm Macquarie to plough £12bn by 2030 into various infrastructure projects including “offshore wind in Lincolnshire and north Scotland, gigabit broadband in rural England and hydrogen hubs in Southampton and Orkney”.

All good, healthy stuff. But, while these investments may be new, Macquarie’s interest in the UK is anything but. In the very next sentence, the Government press release points out that Macquarie has invested more than £50bn in the UK in the last 15 years.

This means the Aussie firm has invested about £3.3bn a year over the past decade and a half and is now planning to invest about £1.5bn a year over the next eight. Hardly a cause for celebration, surely?

In reality, the announcement amounts to hot air. Macquarie – which, let’s not forget, has been called the “Vampire Kangaroo” because of its rapacious appetite for sucking dividends out of UK infrastructure assets – might invest more, it might invest less; no one is going to bother checking whether these commitments have been met when 2030 rolls around.

The bloodsucking ’roo will buy the stuff it thinks is worth buying regardless of how many “hybrid roundtables” Number 10 holds.

That’s fine by me; I’m all for capitalism red in tooth and pouch. The bigger worry is that all this government-generated flimflam is designed to mask the lack of real action on actual, honest-to-goodness trade deals and, even more importantly, business investment.

One of the only real concrete business policies this Government has put in place since the 2019 general election was the super-deduction introduced at last year’s Budget. This allows companies to cut their tax bill by up to 25p for every £1 they invested in qualifying plant and machinery.

However, one overlooked nugget of woe amid the scattered wreckage of the Spring Statement was the Office for Budget Responsibility halving the amount of investment it expects to be brought forward by the measure.