Machine-written complaints should be answered by machines, and Britain should take the afternoon off

I must object.

Not to the complaints, which I accept are arriving in their thousands, beautifully formatted, citing three Acts of Parliament and one that does not exist. I object to the reaction. MPs’ offices, councils, schools and solicitors report being swamped, and the consensus has already settled on its remedy: detect them, filter them, stop them. This is the reflex of a country that has been handed a perpetual-motion machine and asked whether it comes in beige.

Consider what has actually happened. For decades the British complaint was an artisanal product. A resident noticed a pothole, brooded for six weeks and posted the fifth draft. A council officer then spent a further six weeks composing a reply which said, in essence, that the matter had been noted. Neither the pothole nor the resident was improved.

Now half of that process has been automated. The obvious next step is to automate the other half. A machine writes the complaint; a machine reads it, acknowledges it within the statutory period, apologises for any distress caused and escalates it to stage two, where a second machine expresses disappointment that the first was unsatisfactory. The correspondence may run to several hundred pages by teatime. No human need see any of it.

According to an estimate I made this morning on the back of a council tax bill, a typical complaints team spends 71 per cent of its week reading, 22 per cent typing the phrase we are sorry to hear and 7 per cent on everything else, including lunch. Under my proposal officers would still come in. They would simply supervise the machines in the way one supervises a washing machine: by going and doing something else.

It will be objected that genuine grievances might be lost in the exchange. I have considered this. I would point out that genuine grievances are already lost in the exchange, and have been since roughly 1974; the difference is that they will now be lost far more quickly and at a fraction of the cost. A select committee would call this a productivity gain. I call it candour.

What, then, happens when two machines disagree indefinitely? I propose an Ombudsman, also a machine, whose findings would be binding on the other machines and of no interest to anyone else. Should the Ombudsman itself become the subject of a complaint, which it will, the matter would pass to the Treasury, which has operated on these principles for years without anyone noticing.

The reform is not perfect. It requires a twelve-week consultation and a working group, though the working group can of course be machine-written too. But it is the first improvement to British public services in living memory that needs no recruitment, no training budget and no new building in Darlington.

So let the bots argue among themselves. Let them cite case law at each other through the night and apologise for the delay at dawn. The rest of us will finally have the afternoon off. Anyone wishing to object to this column may do so in the usual way. I have already instructed something to reply.