The £225m initiative will be spent on 3,500 playgrounds and 30 adventure play areas staffed with trained supervisors, according to a Sunday newspaper.
Speaking to The Observer ahead of the launch, children's minister Ed Balls said, 'We know that 80 per cent of children prefer to play outside and 86 per cent of parents agreed that on a nice day their children would prefer to go to the park than watch television. Yet children spend less time playing outside than they would like, and less than their parents did as children.
'In our consultations, parents have told us that this is because there are not enough safe places to go - and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that parents think their children are safer playing inside on a computer than playing outside.'
