TL;DR

Complaints drafted with chatbot help are arriving at councils, schools and other public bodies at a length and complexity their handlers were never staffed for — one grievance about uncollected bins ran to somewhere between 19 and 27 pages, quoting case law and Acts of Parliament. Lawyers in Local Government, which speaks for 5,600 council lawyers, estimates coping would take twice the current workforce. The same tools are also genuinely widening access for people who struggle to write.

The cost lands as workload

Deborah Evans, the group’s chief executive, was careful to separate two effects. More people exercising their right to complain is welcome. But the volume of trivial or unjustified submissions has risen alongside it, and so has the effort each one demands: what used to be a single side of A4 now arrives with legislative citations that handlers must refer to lawyers before answering. Doubling complaint-handling headcount is not going to happen, so the realistic outcome is slower replies for everyone.

Schools report the same squeeze. Pepe Di’Iasio of ASCL, the union for school and college leaders, said parents are turning to AI to produce several long complaints at once, which makes them harder to resolve and leaves staff more stretched.

The accuracy problem compounds it. One body told the BBC that AI also gets things wrong and sometimes misquotes legislation — which means handlers spend time disproving confident citations rather than addressing the underlying grievance.

The access argument cuts the other way

Dawn Harverson, who finds writing difficult, made the case for the defence: phone lines have been replaced by email, and someone neurodivergent or intimidated by written English simply will not complain at all. Freedom of Information requests are increasingly AI-drafted too, and the ombudsman covering councils and social care reports more AI-assisted legal challenges to its own decisions.

That is the bind. Measures councils are considering, such as forms capping complaint length, look like efficiency to administrators and like curtailed accountability to everyone else.

Looking forward

This inverts the prevailing story about AI and cash-strapped councils. The technology reached residents before it reached the back office, and it arrived as cost rather than saving — a useful corrective for any UK organisation modelling AI benefits without modelling what happens when the people on the other side of the counter get the same tools. Expect the design question, how to preserve genuine access while discouraging volume for its own sake, to reach the Information Commissioner’s Office before it reaches a solution.