TL;DR

Freedom of information documents obtained by The Ferret show the Scottish Government’s Energy Consents Unit stopped accepting objections by email in January, after officials recorded a sharp rise in AI-assisted submissions on major energy applications. Responses now arrive only through the unit’s own portal or by post. Critics say the effect is to suppress visible opposition.

This is a devolved administration changing a statutory consultation process because generative AI broke the mechanics of it — the first clear UK instance, and unlikely to be the last.

The internal reasoning is unusually plain. Officials described a marked increase in AI use within emailed representations, each needing manual handling with no way to confirm who had actually sent it. That created what one described as a significant administrative burden, and made separating authentic individual concerns from bulk automated text harder. The government’s public position is that the portal guards against fraud and preserves the integrity of consultation.

ObjectNow, a volunteer-run service that helps people generate planning objections with AI assistance, wrote to protest days after the change. It says 50,000 people around the country used it to lodge objections during 2025, mostly against wind farms, battery storage and pylon schemes. Its spokesperson rejected the characterisation of its output as machine-written, saying volunteers draft the underlying letters after working through planning documents and that no submission goes out without a human involved. The group calls the decision a way of muting the real scale of opposition and avoiding headlines of the sort generated when the Kintore–Tealing pylon route drew more than 10,000 objections. Since the ban, it says no Scottish campaign has approached it about an ECU project.

The ECU is not alone in feeling the strain. The Scottish Information Commissioner has capped appeals after an influx of machine-generated FOI appeals. South of the border, one Midlands housing application reportedly drew more than 500 emailed objections from a single resident, including a 160-page document riddled with fabrications.

Both sides have a point that the other cannot easily answer. Volume genuinely is a resource problem for a small consenting team. But a publicly funded body arguing it cannot process submissions is, as ObjectNow notes, an argument about capacity rather than legitimacy — and the tool in question lowers the barrier to participation for people who find the planning system impenetrable.

Looking Forward

Every UK planning authority faces this arithmetic. Watch whether other consenting bodies follow Scotland’s route, and whether anyone attempts the harder alternative: verifying identity and intent rather than restricting the channel.