Ms Carly Bailey:

What we are hearing in the National One Parent Family Alliance, both on our helpline and through other service providers, is that we have to give some allowance in that it is a new scheme and it is inevitable there will be some teething problems and so on. It is being utilised through local authorities and every local authority has a different way of operating, a different set of waiting lists and a different method for prioritising who, what and how. Some of the figures are coming back and we are seeing some improvements in that, but we have to wait for more data to have a better idea of what way that is going to go. Nevertheless, we are hearing from people, including parents and everybody else who is finding themselves in that scenario, that it can take a long time to get even a response from a council or to get an assessor to have a look at the property.

Often we are hearing as well that local authorities are looking at trying to pay under market rent, potentially. This is anecdotal and I cannot give firm figures on that. I can understand this to a certain extent as it is public money and all the rest but obviously we are in an open market situation where it is not necessarily going to go that way. A lot of delay seems to be happening all the way through that process and we hope it may be able to be speeded up.