Council turns to AI to handle a flood of AI-written complaints

[Edward82]

This story is the most 2026 thing I have read all week. Wiltshire Council is looking at using AI tools to help deal with a rising number of complaints, many of which are now being written with AI. The council logged 783 formal complaints in 2025-26, a 27 percent jump on the year before, with adult social care the biggest single area at 158 cases. So we now have AI writing complaints and AI helping to read them

The council says AI drafted complaints tend to be much longer than ones people write themselves. They can also contain factual mistakes or details that do not reflect the person's actual situation, which makes them slower to investigate. Wiltshire is keen to stress that AI will assist staff rather than replace them, and that humans will stay in charge of decisions

Stroud District Council has also noticed the trend, handling over 620 complaints, although it is only discussing the issue for now. It is not just councils either. A law firm has reported that AI written questions are slowing down property sales, as buyers fire off long lists of generated queries that someone then has to answer

Councillor Ruth Hopkinson summed up the unease nicely, saying the thought of AI generated complaints being answered by AI generated responses makes her blood run cold. I can see her point. Complaints are supposed to be a way for people to be heard, and if both sides are just machines talking to each other, something important is lost

On the other hand, I understand why people use AI to write them. Plenty of residents struggle to put a complaint into formal language, and a chatbot can help them feel taken seriously. The problem is when it pads things out or gets the facts wrong. Have you used AI to write a complaint or formal letter, and did it help?

Council uses AI to tackle AI-generated complaintswww.bbc.co.uk

[Tara_66]

Summarising long complaints with AI for staff is sensible. As long as a person reads the key points and makes the decision, I see no harm in it. Councils are stretched enough already

[Paige_68]

Factual inaccuracies are the real issue. If the AI invents details or misreads the situation, staff waste time investigating things that never happened. That slows down every other complaint in the queue too. People need to check what they send before they hit submit

[ClusterCrossing]

A 27 percent rise in a single year is a big jump for any council. Some of that will be people who never would have complained before now finding it easier. That is not necessarily bad

Access to the complaints process should be easy. The challenge is dealing with the volume

[ThatGirl]

I used ChatGPT to help with a complaint about bin collections and it turned three lines into two pages. Had to cut most of it

It was useful for getting the tone right though. I was angry and it made me sound reasonable. That probably helped more than the extra length

[R931]

Property lawyers drowning in AI generated enquiries does not surprise me. Buying a house was slow enough already. Now every buyer can generate fifty questions in seconds, and someone has to answer every single one. Solicitors must be tearing their hair out. Conveyancing was slow enough before

[Gold Wolf]

Adult social care having the most complaints is the part that matters. Those are often vulnerable people or their families in stressful situations. If AI helps them explain problems clearly, good. But their cases deserve a human reading every word

[alwaysRock40]

AI versus AI in the council complaints department. We have reached peak bureaucracy. Soon nobody will read anything and the machines will just argue among themselves

[Local Daemon]

The sheer irony is palpable. We spent decades complaining about the lack of human connection in public services, and now we have eliminated the last shred of it. A machine will write a letter to another machine, and a different machine will write a reply to that letter. The whole interaction is a digital handoff with no human acknowledgment. It is the ultimate abstraction of distance, and I am sure we will see a surge in legal challenges once someone realizes their grievance was never actually read.

[AJStyles92]

Tangent: My council recently started using auto-generated emails for parking tickets. If I appeal, the reply is a generic template that says "we are reviewing your case" which never actually gets resolved. Now I imagine a server farm in Southampton is quietly deciding my fate while the humans just nod along. It feels less like bureaucracy and more like being sentenced by a vending machine that has reached a software glitch.