Public bodies across the UK are drowning in chatbot-written complaints, with one MP’s caseworker saying half her office’s emails now involve AI.
Hollie Wickens has spent a decade handling constituents’ problems for a Labour MP. She told the Guardian the flow began in 2024 and has since become relentless. “Half the emails we receive are some form of AI,” she said.
Her point is not that the emails are rude or wrong. It is that they are denser and harder to unpick, even for someone who has done the job for years.
Two pages became 20
Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, which represents 5,600 council lawyers, says every sector she hears from is describing the same thing. A complaint to a local authority once ran to about two pages. Most are now around 10 times that, she told the Guardian, and the longest she knows of is 200 pages.
The subject matter is mundane: adult social care, missed bin collections, planning objections. The packaging is not. Chatbots tend to treat a grumble as a legal claim, Evans said, citing statute and case law that may come from another country’s courts. They also sometimes make material up.
Councils spot the output by its length, its bullet points and certain stock phrases. Alessandro Georgiou, leader of Enfield council, told the Guardian that more residents are using AI to challenge council decisions, with a marked rise in parking appeals.
The money does not follow the paperwork. Evans pointed out that councils get no extra funding when complaints rise.
Manchester City Council has gone as far as writing the issue into its customer complaints policy. It warns that AI content can be irrelevant, misleading or false, and says complainants are responsible for what they send.
‘Everyone’s got a free lawyer’
Employers are seeing it too. One technology start-up founder, speaking anonymously to the Guardian, said a former employee dismissed over performance is challenging the decision at an employment tribunal. The founder insists the process was fair and expects legal costs of about £30,000 by the time of the hearing.
“Everyone’s got a free lawyer now,” the founder said.
Government figures cited by the Guardian show new single-claimant tribunal claims between April and June were up 28% on a year earlier, at 14,000. Fewer cases were concluded in the same period, leaving 70,000 open at the end of June.
Jim Moore, an employee relations specialist at Hamilton Nash, says many of his clients now get letters that are wholly or largely AI-written. He describes them as bloated, with minor incidents inflated into serious offences. Many also forget to say what the complainant actually wants.
Statutory clocks keep ticking
Freedom of information requests come with legal deadlines, so volume bites quickly. Transport for London logged 4,769 FoI requests in 2025-26, its highest ever and 5% above the previous peak in 2023-24, the Guardian reported. Minutes of its audit and assurance committee also note a rise in appeals that look AI-generated and lean on technical claims that are often inaccurate.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) published guidance in May for authorities handling AI-drafted FoI requests. It says they can misquote the law or need heavy clarification before work can start. Deborah Clark, the ICO’s upstream regulation manager, said practitioners had told the regulator the trend was “changing the day-to-day reality of their work”.
The watchdog’s line is that an AI-drafted request is still a request. Lawyers at Burges Salmon read the guidance as telling authorities to answer in the usual way and help requesters refine them, rather than refuse. The ICO does allow refusal in some cases, such as repeated near-identical requests or organised campaigns, according to Wiggin LLP.
The inbox at Westminster
MPs’ offices are feeling the strain. Vonnie Sandlan, head of office for Dunfermline and Dollar MP Graeme Downie, said her team is exhausted and working beyond their contracted hours. Her office has stopped replying to automated “click to email your MP” campaigns so it can concentrate on individual constituents’ cases.
Sandlan accepted that AI could help people who struggle to put their problems into words.
Lisa Gillmore, president of the GMB union’s MPs’ and peers’ staff branch, said that where offices keep their own figures, casework has at least doubled. The Independent reported on 25 October that police forces, schools and councils described similar problems, according to a Resultsense summary.
Some councils are now weighing AI tools of their own to summarise long letters and draft first replies, and ombudsmen are bringing in length limits, ua.news said in its account of the Guardian report. For now, a human still has to read each page.
Sources: The Guardian, Information Commissioner's Office, Local Government Lawyer, Resultsense, Burges Salmon, Wiggin LLP, ua.news, Manchester City Council
This story was compiled by the MDW Newsdesk with AI-assisted tools, using the reporting credited above.
