Is AI really the problem with your complaints inbox?

Even before getting directly involved with Community Groups, the first time I ever wrote to a public body took me the best part of a weekend. Not because the point was complicated. The point was simple, and I’d have told you it in about nine seconds if you’d asked me in the street. The weekend went on working out which mechanism applied, what the thing was actually called, which department owned it, and how to word four hundred words so that nobody could file them under “disgruntled” and move on. Most of my time was spent making myself sound like the sort of person who gets replied to.

Which brings me to the article going round about public bodies buckling under a rising tide of AI-assisted complaints and freedom of information requests. Longer submissions, more of them, more detailed, harder to fob off. Among the remedies floated: word limits.

Given I now chair a community council, I often have live correspondence with a local authority. I am, on any fair reading, one of the people creating content and requests for the LA to deal with. Adjust for that as you see fit.

First, the case against me

Let’s take the other side seriously, because it deserves better than the strawman version.

Somewhere in a building you’ve driven past, there is an officer, let’s call her Morag, who handles information requests. This is not her job. It is a portion of her job, bolted onto a role that was already full when they bolted it on. She has statutory deadlines, no discretion about them, and a queue that has doubled since roughly the back end of last year.

The cost of writing a request has collapsed to almost nothing. The cost of answering one hasn’t moved a millimetre. Somebody still has to search the systems, pull the records, redact the third-party data, take advice on the exemptions, and get it signed off. Morag cannot generate her way out. That asymmetry is real, it’s new, and it would be biting even on an organisation doing absolutely everything right.

And not every extra request is a symptom of a failing service. Some of it is curiosity that previously never made it past the effort barrier. Some of it is people firing off five requests because sending five now costs the same as sending one. Some of it is duplication. If you work in this and you’ve been quietly furious at commentators like me waving it all away as councils being touchy, that fury is earned. The volume is not imaginary.

And the twenty-seven-page problem is real too

I’m not going to pretend I haven’t seen the output. Somebody with a genuine, specific, entirely fixable grievance runs it through a chatbot and gets back twenty-seven pages, with an executive summary, five appendices, and a legislative framework section citing the wrong Act. If they can read beyond the em dashes and unusual word choices, the actual complaint is in there somewhere. It’s on page nine, in the middle of a paragraph that begins “furthermore”.

That helps nobody, and it hurts the complainant most. Their point is now buried under a mountain of unnecessary detail, and Morag has to channel her inner Tony Robinson and go fully archaeological before she can even work out what’s being asked. Length is not rigour. It’s usually the tell of someone handed a tool and never told what it was for. A complaint nobody can find isn’t a complaint, it’s a filing problem with a covering letter.

So yes, there is something here to fix. I just don’t think it’s the thing being proposed, and I think the proposal quietly gives away what’s really being objected to.

The filter nobody designed

Go back to my original request. Pre-Community Council, just Joe Public asking some questions about a bit of land he used to walk his dog on and a dubious right-of-access restriction from a questionable landowner. Everything that took me those two days was a skill, and none of those skills had the first thing to do with whether my complaint was justified.

Knowing which mechanism applies. Knowing the right name for the thing. Structuring an argument so it can’t be waved off. Getting several hundred words down without your frustration leaking all over them. That is a filter on articulacy, it has always sat between people and the institutions that serve them, and it has been quietly sorting grievances by education for as long as any of us have been alive.

Nobody talks about the filter but absolutely everybody in these organisations has relied on it, because it kept the volume down by keeping certain people out. The person juggling their family, people for whom English isn’t their first language, the person whose written English isn’t their strong suit, the man who’s been fobbed off four times and now cannae write about it without the anger showing. They had exactly the same right to complain as me. They just didn’t have the ability to express themselves in the same way, so historically, they just didn’t.

That filter is dissolving. It is not a coincidence that this looks like a flood from the inside. What’s arriving is partly the correspondence that was always owed to these organisations and never turned up. Calling it spam is basically declaring outright whose voice counts, and it’s worth being sure you want to make it.

Why word limits in particular

A word limit doesn’t filter for vexatiousness. It doesn’t filter for duplication, or bad faith, or the same question asked eleven times. It filters for concision, which is a writing skill, which is the articulacy thing in a thinly veiled disguise. It catches your twenty-seven-page correspondent and it catches somebody making a perfectly reasonable complaint about a complicated thing, and it lets through anybody polished enough to be brief. That is precisely backwards.

Statutory tools already exist. FOISA has a cost ceiling. There are provisions for vexatious and repeated requests. A body genuinely swamped by abusive volume has ways and means of dealing with this. New limits get reached for when the existing ones don’t catch what you actually find annoying.

So whose fault is it?

The easy road to take is that councils have brought this on themselves with a decade of decline and are now casting about for something to blame. It’s a satisfying sentence. I don’t think it survives contact with the detail.

Local government in Scotland doesn’t set its own funding envelope. A lot of what reads as inaction from the outside is triage, done by people with a shrinking budget and a growing pile of statutory duties. Budget decisions aren’t generally about what’s getting investment this year, they are about what is being defunded. Where the responsibility really sits between central settlement, local decision-making and a decade of national choices is genuinely contested, and anyone telling you it’s obvious is selling something.

What I think holds regardless of who’s funding councils, though: if dissatisfaction is rising, the complaints are the measurement, not the root cause. Capping the measurement treats nothing. It just means whoever finds out how bad things have got will find out later, with less warning, and probably from the Ombudsman rather than from Morag.

And the two causes of the volume genuinely need separating before anyone designs a policy response. Some of the increase is friction disappearing, and that’s a capacity problem, which should be argued as one, loudly, in front of whoever holds the purse strings. Some of it is people who have been unhappy for years and have only now found a way to say so that gets a reply. That second one isn’t a correspondence problem at all. It’s a service problem that happens to be arriving through the medium of correspondence.

What should public bodies do to solve it?

• Say what good looks like, and mean it. If a clear one-page request gets a faster answer, publish that, with an example. People will use it. Most of them aren’t trying to swamp you in paperwork, they just don’t know what you need from them. Make their lives easier, make your lives easier: it’s a win-win.
• Use the same technology on your side of the desk. Triage, deduplication, pulling the three actual asks out of twenty-seven pages. The tool driving the volume is not badly suited to handling it. Let Morag have the same tools that Joe Public has.
• Publish proactively. A serious chunk of FOI traffic is asking for things that could just be on the website. Transparency is key to reducing requests. Every dataset or report you publish is a queue that never forms. Hiding things behind vague filing-cabinet labels helps proliferate a perception of secrecy.
• Read the pattern, not just the letters. Twenty requests about the same junction is a service failing with twenty eyewitnesses. See the bigger picture.
• Use the provisions you already have, properly. They exist for a reason. Applying them where they genuinely fit is a better answer than a blanket rule that catches the articulate and inarticulate alike.
• Make the capacity argument out loud. If the honest position is that the team is two people and the queue has doubled, say that publicly. It’s a far stronger case than anything that sounds like blaming the public for writing in.

Questions to ask yourself

• Of the requests we got last quarter, how many were about basically the same things?
• How much of what we were asked for could simply have been published?
• Are we taking longer than we were, or just being asked things we’d rather not answer?
• Who is writing to us now who wasn’t writing to us three years ago, and what does that tell us?
• If we halved the correspondence tomorrow, would anything about the service have improved?

If your inbox is fuller than it was, the useful question isn’t how to empty it. It’s whether the letters are wrong. If they are, you have a capacity problem and you should be shouting about it to the people who fund you. If they’re not, then more people managing to tell you the truth about your service is not a crisis. It might be the best management information the building has had in years, and it arrived for free.

A tool that lets somebody finally say the thing they’ve been trying to say for three years is not spam. It just means they no longer need a Higher or A level in written English to articulate an argument.