ONE OF the more cheering things in otherwise very depressing news has been the huge amount of local support for Ukrainian visitors.

An inspiring number of local people have offered their homes to host Ukrainian families and the first families have started to arrive. Across Surrey getting on for a thousand families have now been matched with over two thousand Ukrainians.

I am a big supporter of the scheme but like many have found the bureaucracy intensely frustrating. So far I have been in contact with the Home Office about over 100 applications – with about a quarter of those having now received visas or Permission to Travel documents.

I have also been in direct contact with British Airways and its owner IAG about their refusal to accept official travel documentation from people who don’t have passports, an issue which has now been resolved.

We do seem to get there in the end and the first families have started arriving. I spoke to a Farnham head last week who had enrolled her first Ukrainian child already and was expecting another three on Monday.

For schools there is a different issue, namely the lack of funding particularly for interpreter costs when a child doesn’t speak any English. These can cost £400 a day, well beyond the budget a school could reasonably be asked to fund. Given that most of the new arrivals won’t speak English, I wonder whether intensive English language lessons might not be a better place to start, something I will be taking up with the Education Secretary.

In order to better co-ordinate and manage local and national activity, Michael Gove’s ministry has appointed regional leads who will attend local meetings to hear first-hand some of the issues being identified. The Surrey Task Group has been set up to do this and look at issues like the breakdown of matching arrangements, inappropriate accommodation, data provision, the challenges of the Family Sponsorship scheme, local authority capacity to manage additional demands, homelessness and safeguarding.

Two practical bits of news about which many people have contacted me: Homes for Ukraine households will not lose council tax discounts due to more members joining the household and the £350 weekly ‘thank you’ payments will be free from income tax and corporation tax.

It is a formidably complicated process to get this right but very important that we do so. We are a generous-hearted nation and that means playing a key role in responding to the humanitarian crisis just as we are in supporting the military response by the Ukrainian military.