AI-Written Complaints: What UK Councils Are Learning, and What It Means for Your Business

A complaint about the bins, 27 pages long

A complaint about an uncollected bin used to be a phone call or a short email. Now it can arrive as a 27-page document quoting case law and Acts of Parliament. People are using AI chatbots to write their complaints, and UK councils, schools and ombudsmen are struggling to keep up. In our view, this is coming to businesses next, and the ones that handle it well will be the ones that look past the length and find the real problem underneath.

We've taken a closer look at what public bodies are seeing, what they are learning, and what it means for any business with a complaints inbox.

What is happening

In August, the BBC reported that councils and schools were receiving complaints, appeals and Freedom of Information requests drafted with chatbots. Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, said some complaints about uncollected bins had grown to between 19 and 27 pages. Because they cite legislation, complaints staff sometimes need a lawyer to check them, which costs money and slows everyone down.

In October, Sky News compared complaint numbers before and after ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Household complaints about water companies were up 144%, complaints about English councils up 78% and written complaints to GP practices up 71%. Complaints to the Housing Ombudsman have gone from about 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year. Researchers have started calling it "agentic flooding".

It is worth being careful here. Sky News itself pointed out that a rise after 2022 does not prove AI caused it. Water companies, for example, have had a difficult few years. But the pattern is the same across very different services: years of little change, then a steady climb.

The facts are often wrong

The bigger problem is not length but accuracy. Chatbots can invent things that sound convincing, which is known as "hallucinating".

The Financial Ombudsman Service, which settles disputes between customers and banks, insurers and lenders, has been open about this. Its chief ombudsman, James Dipple-Johnstone, told the Financial Times that in the worst case he had seen, 37 of the 39 references in one submission were wrong. The ombudsman says some complaints cite laws, regulations and past decisions that do not exist.

Its response is a simple one. It is picking up the phone more often, to find out what the customer is actually unhappy about.

The consumer campaigner Helen Dewdney, who writes The Complaining Cow, tested chatbots herself. One told her to threaten the wrong regulator over a broadband complaint. Another pointed her to an ombudsman that does not exist.

But many of these complaints are genuine

It would be easy to treat AI-written complaints as nuisance mail. That would be a mistake.

Sky News found the Department for Work and Pensions still upholds close to 40% of complaints. The share has dropped from the 50s, but four in ten is a lot of people who were right. The Information Commissioner's Office has also confirmed that a Freedom of Information request written with AI is just as valid as any other.

Many of the people using these tools are not trying to cause trouble. They are people who have never complained before, find writing hard, or don't have English as a first language. A chatbot gives them a voice. The problem is that it also gives them 20 pages of padding and a few made-up laws.

Why this matters for businesses

Public bodies are seeing it first because they have legal duties to respond in full. Businesses are next. The Financial Ombudsman has already said financial firms are receiving long, AI-written complaints full of errors, and calls it an emerging risk. Customers who use a chatbot to complain to their council will use the same chatbot to complain to their builder, their letting agent or their accountant.

In our experience, the businesses that will cope best are the ones that decide how they will handle this before the first 20-page email lands.

What we suggest

Don't dismiss it because AI wrote it. Read for the actual problem. There is usually a real grievance in the first page or two, and that is what you need to fix.

Pick up the phone. The Financial Ombudsman's approach works for small businesses too. A five-minute call often gets to the heart of a complaint faster than a written reply to every point.

Check the facts, and don't be rattled by legal language. If a complaint quotes a law or regulation, check it exists and says what the complaint claims. Confident wording is not the same as being right, and you shouldn't make concessions based on rules that aren't real.

Make it easy to complain well. A short form asking what happened, when, and what the customer would like you to do encourages a clear complaint rather than an essay.

Use AI to help, not to reply on its own. AI is genuinely good at summarising a long document and pulling out the main points. But a person should decide and write the response. The journalist Sam Freedman has warned that this could end with "chatbots talking to each other", and nobody is well served by that.

Check your own replies. If your team uses AI to draft responses, make sure someone reads them before they go. An AI-written reply with a mistake in it is a fast way to turn a small complaint into a big one.

If you'd like help setting up a simple, sensible way to handle complaints, including where AI can save your team time, get in touch. We're always happy to talk it through.

Emma at Cow-shed