UK Councils and Employers Say AI-Written Complaints Are Swamping Their Staff

"Half the emails we receive are some form of AI," Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP's office, told the newspaper. She said the volume had grown from a trickle in 2024 into an "onslaught", and that the messages were more complex and took longer to deal with.

The problem has been nicknamed "AI clog". It shows a cost of generative AI that rarely appears in productivity forecasts. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini make it nearly free to produce formal correspondence, but every letter still has to be read and answered by staff at public bodies whose budgets have not grown. Researchers at the Hertie School's centre for digital governance in Berlin, the Cooperative AI Foundation and GovAI have called the practice of overwhelming public bodies with AI-generated requests "agentic flooding".

Longer Letters and Borrowed Case Law

Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, which represents 5,600 lawyers working in councils, said every sector was seeing similar problems. Before chatbots became widespread, she said, a typical council complaint ran to about two pages, and most are now ten times longer. The longest she knows of is about 200 pages. "Local authorities have one pot of money and don't get extra money because of more complaints," she said.

Evans said AI tools often treat a complaint as a legal claim. They cite statutes and case law that may come from outside the relevant jurisdiction, sometimes Canada, and occasionally they make things up. Councils say the length of a letter, certain stock phrases and the use of bullet points suggest a machine wrote it. Alessandro Georgiou, leader of Enfield council, said residents were increasingly using AI to appeal council decisions, including a significant rise in parking appeals.

The Information Commissioner's Office found that many public authorities received more information requests in 2025. It said AI-generated requests can be "very long, repetitive and contain unrelated comments or misdirected demands", and are often wider in scope and harder to pin down. Even so, the regulator says requests that appear to be AI-drafted and contain errors must still be answered by a person.

Employment Tribunals Under Strain

Employers report the same pattern. The founder of a technology start-up, who was not named, said a former employee dismissed on performance grounds had taken the company to an employment tribunal with what the founder believes is an AI-written claim. The founder expects legal fees to reach £30,000 by the time the case is heard. "Everyone's got a free lawyer now," the founder said.

Government figures show 14,000 single-claimant employment tribunal claims were opened between April and June, up 28% on a year earlier. Fewer cases were concluded during the quarter, which left 70,000 single claims open at the end of June. Jim Moore, an employee relations specialist at Hamilton Nash, said many of his clients receive letters that are wholly AI-generated or lean heavily on AI wording. He described them as "unnecessarily verbose", with "embellished or exaggerated claims that portray relatively minor incidents as major offences".

The ICO's position means public bodies cannot simply set aside letters they suspect were written by AI. Councils funded from fixed budgets will have to absorb the extra workload unless they find faster ways to process it.