Readers have been inundating my Question of Money column with complaints about how long the Post Office is taking to open accounts. In some cases, their money has “vanished” for as long as two months before their account is opened, causing extreme frustration and worry.

Poh Naidu waited 84 days to get the documentation on the £35,000 she had invested in her account. Nick Rowntree has waited 60 days — and at time of writing still has nothing to show for his £35,000.

Norman Leater, meanwhile, waited for just over two months until — fed up with the bruises from “banging his head against a brick wall” — he wrote to the Question of Money column as a last resort.

The Post Office has fallen into the usual trap of launching super-competitive products, only to find that it cannot cope with the resulting flood of applications — leaving savers in the dark.

In some respects, the Post Office can congratulate itself on its tie-up with the Bank of Ireland, its financial partner in UK retail savings products.

The partnership began in July 2004, and in the past few years it has launched a series of excellent products.

In particular, its Instant Saver Account, launched in April 2006; its Growth Bond 6a, launched in June this year; and Growth Bond 7, offered at the start of last month, have attracted savers in droves.

Growth Bond 6a offered a rate of 7.05% fixed for one year — a mouth-watering rate at the time, and now even more so. Growth Bond 7, offering a one-year fixed rate of 6.85%, proved even more popular. It was launched 10 days after the Irish government’s announcement that it would back 100% of all deposits in a number of the country’s banks, including Bank of Ireland.

Bond 7 had to be withdrawn from sale less than a fortnight later. The Post Office refuses to say how much money it attracted for reasons of commercial confidence, but one can assume it was huge.

While the products are sold through the Post Office’s still-extensive branch network, all processing of the applications has been done through Bank of Ireland’s back offices spread between Ireland, the UK and India.

An indication of just how big the demand was for the two Growth Bonds (and how ill-prepared Bank of Ireland was, initially, to deal with it) is the fact that Bank of Ireland has had to increase the number of staff dealing with applications by four times from July to today.

The fact that admin has been done at such arm’s length has caused both confusion and dismay among frustrated applicants. Leater, for instance, was eventually told his application was being held up due to problems over establishing his identity. “This seemed so odd to me. I handed in my application at my local office where I am well-known — the postmaster lives just two doors away from me.”