payments

"The rollout of the environmental schemes has been done too slowly, and they've got rid of the old payments too quickly," he says.

Some victims of the infected blood scandal have been told interim compensation payments of £100,000 due to be made before Christmas have been put on hold.

But with the average age of first-time buyers rising - it now stands at nearly 34 - the question of how people will be able to afford mortgage payments when they hope to retire becomes increasingly important.

Miss Hudson said this claim was "absolutely ludicrous", and if the payments took so long to go through, it was because the app did not process them straight away.

The GPs contracted to run the surgeries said they had faced financial "challenges", and that some locum payments had been "delayed", but would be settled.