Chatbots have made it free to write a formal, legal-sounding complaint, and UK public bodies are paying for it. Most council complaints now run to about twenty pages, and the longest runs to about 200. In one MP's office, half the email is now written with AI. Nobody has more money or more staff to read it all.
The effort was doing a job nobody noticed
A two-page complaint used to take an evening and some knowledge of how the system works. That evening was a crude filter: whoever sent the complaint cared enough to spend it, so staff could assume there was a real grievance behind the letter.
Now a letter with bullet points, statute and case law looks equally serious whether the grievance is real or not. Sometimes the case law comes from Canada and does not apply. It costs the sender half a minute and costs the council a caseworker's time. A two-page complaint takes a few minutes to read. Twenty pages with the citations checked is closer to an hour, and that hour comes out of the same budget that pays for bin collections and care visits. Regulators were already seeing the same rise in September.
Fees work, and they hit the wrong people
When the flood arrives, charging a fee is the fastest fix, and the 2013 tribunal fees show how well it works. An unfair dismissal claim cost £250 to file and another £950 for the hearing, and claims dropped by almost 70%. The fees stopped weak claims, and they stopped strong ones too, including from people who could not find £1,200. That is why the court threw them out.
Researchers who study this flooding of government services reach the same conclusion: the quickest measures are the ones that shut out fair access. A fee on a parking appeal would do to residents what the tribunal fee did to workers.
The filter that is left is the outcome
The one thing every complaint needs is the one many AI-written complaints leave out: what the person wants done. A council complaints team could replace its open text box with three questions: what happened, what do you want us to do, and what evidence do you have. Each answer could have a page limit.
A resident can still use ChatGPT to fill in the form, and should, because turning a muddle of grievances into three clear answers is what a chatbot does well. The form does not care who wrote the answers. It cares that the answers are there. That keeps help open to people who struggle to write, and it removes the length that makes the flood expensive.
It also holds up when the other side uses AI. Some councils are already looking at tools that summarise long emails. A summary of a 200-page letter keeps only the ask, so a complaint that opens with its ask loses nothing, and a complaint that hides it loses the most. Within a couple of years, I expect the question about the outcome you want to be the first one on most public forms.
If you write complaints, to a council, a landlord or an employer, ask the chatbot to cut yours to a single page that opens with what you want. The long version feels more convincing to write, and it is the one a tired caseworker puts at the bottom of the pile.