AI Drives 39% Rise in Tribunal Cases as Public Services Face Complaint Surge

1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Oct 20

Employment tribunal cases in England, Scotland and Wales rose 39% in a year, with AI-drafted claims adding to a broader surge in complaints, requests and responses hitting public bodies.
ChatGPT-era tools are helping people generate freedom of information requests, letters to MPs and legal filings at scale, forcing staff and judges to sift machine-written material for genuine issues.
That workload undercuts government hopes that AI will save billions of pounds by streamlining the state, because time cut in one part of the system is reappearing as manual review elsewhere.
Agentic AI could intensify the bottleneck if mass adoption makes interactions even easier to automate, raising pressure for new filters or frictions to keep public services usable.