UK public bodies, including local authorities and courts, are reporting a massive increase in workload due to a surge in correspondence generated by artificial intelligence. This phenomenon, described by researchers as "agentic flooding," involves users utilizing chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini to rapidly produce complex, formal, and lengthy letters, complaints, and legal challenges. While AI developers promised productivity gains by automating routine tasks, organizations report that the resulting influx of messages is actually gumming up operations and stretching already limited resources.
Local authorities are seeing significant increases in complaints regarding issues ranging from adult social care to bin collections and planning applications. Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, noted that while AI can make a complaint sound incredibly professional, it has led to a dramatic increase in the length of correspondence. Evans stated that while the average length of complaints used to be approximately two pages, many are now ten times longer, with some reaching 200 pages.
Councillor Alessandro Georgiou, leader of Enfield council, reported a significant uptick in residents using AI to appeal council decisions, specifically regarding parking appeals. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found that many public authorities received more requests in 2025, noting that AI-generated requests are often long, repetitive, and contain misdirected demands or unrelated comments that make it difficult to identify the specific information being requested.
Despite the complexity and potential inaccuracies of these documents, the ICO cautioned that human employees are still required to answer requests that appear to be drafted using AI. The administrative burden is also impacting other sectors; Transport for London (TfL) received a record 4,769 freedom of information requests in 2025-26, a 5% increase over the previous peak in 2023-24. Meanwhile, government figures show that employment tribunal claims opened between April and June soared by 28% compared to the previous year, contributing to a backlog of 70,000 open single claims as of the end of June.
