Hi slick132 Thanks for your reply. The account was closed end of August 2012 so not long! It is also a current account. (Apparently the person I spoke to at Barclays said that there have been a large number of accounts closed recently so imagine there could be many people in the same boat.)

Barclays it seems have made dormant a whole lot of accounts including my own (due to inactivity). Having filled in the necessary dormant account form to get access to the money in that account I phoned today to check on its progress. I have been told they are taking 12 weeks to process these requests. This seems to me to be an outrageous length of time. No justification given other than they seem to have many other such requests. They were not even able to confirm whether or not they had received my request! This all to me seems utterly unacceptable. Anyone any tips on how I can speed this process up? I have complained to the Financial Ombudsmen but the time in which Barclays will need to respond to this is 8 weeks - though this is less than 12!