The part-time probate office is compounding families’ grief

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.

In response to a crisis, why does the Civil Service always seem to decide that the answer is to make life easier for its staff and more difficult for its customers? Helplines will now presumably be jammed with callers from 9am to 1pm every day, as bereaved relatives seek help with their applications.

Families are already waiting far too long for probate to be granted. A compulsory legal process that used to take a few weeks now takes months and sometimes as much as a year. At one of life’s most upsetting and stressful times, grieving families are being left in limbo.

Having overcome the first layer of bureaucracy by registering a death and assembling all the necessary paperwork to apply for the grant of probate, their applications sit at the registry, often waiting for several weeks before being opened, let alone processed.

In the meantime, the assets of the deceased are effectively frozen. Until a grant of probate is provided by the registry, the house belonging to the deceased cannot be sold. Across the country, homes stand empty as a result, not only gumming up the housing market but also creating a headache for the bereaved.

Unoccupied houses are difficult and expensive to insure and they have to be secured and maintained, often by families living a distance away. Worse still, if the deceased’s assets reached the threshold for inheritance tax to be payable, HMRC requires the tax to be paid within six months of the death, failing which a hefty interest rate is charged at 2.5 percentage points above the Bank of England base rate. Yet if a property cannot be sold due to delays at the probate registry, the money still has to be found, as HMRC will not accept probate delay as an excuse.

These are the harsh realities facing grieving families on a daily basis, while one of the most basic functions of government bureaucracy is mired in chaos. Perhaps the worst of it is that no one is really surprised any more.

The reasons for this particular failure were all too predictable. Five years ago, England and Wales had a fairly efficient and responsive probate service, regionally based in district registries around the country, with experienced staff who could turn around applications promptly and rarely made mistakes.

To “streamline” the service, the district registries were closed and the process centralised and – guess what – “digitalised”. Experienced staff faced redundancy, on the basis that the new digital system would be cheap and efficient, requiring fewer, lower-paid, employees.

Sounds familiar? Not surprisingly, the transition to a digital system has been fraught with difficulties; probate lawyers complain that, when a grant of probate is finally received, it is much more likely to contain errors and will have to be returned to the registry for correction.

But this is what the ordinary citizen has come to expect of the modern British state. Pay more – in taxes and fees – for a worse service. And don’t expect anything to improve under a Labour government, where more services will be sucked into state monopolies and we will all have to stand in the queue.