While announcing that his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales will become its first patron, trustees for the Canal and River Trust have expressed frustration over its delayed launch schedule.

The new charity derived from former quango British Waterways to take on the management of 2,000 miles of canals and rivers in England and Wales. It was originally due to launch this month, then a revised date of June 2012 was touted. This has now been further amended to a more cautious "late June or early July".

The latest progress report from the trustees following the first meeting of the organisation's advisory council in Birmingham reveals that “there is still a lot of process to complete” despite "every week bringing important progress and a step nearer the final transition", including the appointment of the Prince of Wales as its first patron.

The Canal and River Trust is awaiting Parliamentary approval of its Transfer Order, and says that there is no way of guaranteeing when this will materialise.

“We fully understand that Parliament should scrutinise the transfer; after all, this is the biggest shake-up of the nation’s waterways since they were nationalised 60 years ago," a spokesman for the Trust added following the trustees' statement.

"But after having made such encouraging progress so far, with stakeholders and supporters fully behind the transfer, it is a little frustrating that we can’t quite yet announce a launch date. We’re now hoping to get underway during the summer window between the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (5 June) and the start of the Olympics (27 July).”

However, he added: “When we first put out our vision for becoming a waterways charity, we said it would happen before 2020 – so we are actually very much ahead of schedule, overall.”

The Canal and River Trust considers the appointment of the Prince of Wales as its first patron as an “important milestone in building support and credibility of the Trust”, as well as “further testimony to the wide-ranging support [it has].”

The Trust has meanwhile been collecting the views of people around the nation's waterways, attending a workshop jointly hosted by British Waterways and the Inland Waterways Association, meeting with trustees of the Waterway Trust and giving evidence in Parliament. It has also undertaken pre-registration discussions with the Charity Commission.

The key steps still standing in the way of an official launch are:

• the completion of Parliament’s inspection of the Transfer Order
• the debates on the transfer by both Houses of Parliament; registration with the Charity Commission
• and the appointment of members of the remaining Waterway partnerships (around a quarter of the 11 total).

In January the government announced a £1bn, 15-year funding package for the Trust, comprising a core grant of £39m annually, a £25m one-off grant and an additional grant of £10m per year from 2015, related to performance measures.

When the idea of moving British Waterways from the public to voluntary sector was first mooted in early 2010, a Bates Wells and Braithwaite report concluded that such a shift would create the UK’s 13th-largest charity by income and the country’s fifth-largest fundraising charity.