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Our consumer champion SALLY HAMILTON picked up the phone to find the quickest way to speak to a real person on some of the UK's busiest helplines.
Civil service probate delays are stalling cancer research and holding up millions in donations to charities, MPs have been told.
Ministers have vowed to crack down on the misery of endless waiting in a telephone queue while being tortured by holding musak.
Government services in Britain seem to be grinding to a halt. This week it was revealed that civil servants in the probate registry will no longer answer telephone enquiries after lunchtime. Their justification for this decision is that their huge backlog of probate documentation can only be tackled if they close their helpline at 1pm every day, for a period of at least three months.
According to the latest quarterly statistics from HM Courts and Tribunals Service, which runs the probate service, probate applications took an average of 14 weeks between April and June. There is currently a backlog of around 8,000 probate applications.