As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly check if a debt is statute barred.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the creditor letters, statements, court papers and relevant bank records, and make a list of each debt without copying account numbers or other unnecessary personal data.
   2. Write down the UK jurisdiction, debt type, creditor, last payment date, last written acknowledgement date, any court claim or judgment date, and any later enforcement date, marking uncertain dates as uncertain.
   3. Paste the redacted list and correspondence extracts into a chatbot with the supplied prompt, asking it to keep an evidence source beside every date.
   4. Open the current GOV.UK guidance identified by the chatbot and compare its wording with the debt type and jurisdiction in your table.
   5. Check every date in the chatbot's table against the original statement, letter or court document, and correct the table where the source does not support the date.
   6. Send the corrected timeline and the original documents to a solicitor or qualified debt adviser before admitting the debt, making a payment, or relying on it being statute barred.

   Prompt

   Help me organise the facts about whether a UK debt may be statute barred. Do not give a final legal conclusion and do not tell me to ignore a creditor or stop making payments. First identify the jurisdiction: England and Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland. Then create a table with the debt type, creditor, date of the last payment, date of any written acknowledgement, date of any court claim or judgment, dates of enforcement activity, and the source for each date. Mark every missing or uncertain fact. Explain which facts could change the analysis, including any court judgment, secured or mortgage-related debt, benefit overpayment, fraud allegation, or other special category. Use only the information I provide and current official UK guidance that I can open and check. Separate general information from questions that need a solicitor or qualified debt adviser. Do not invent dates, rules, limitation periods, or citations. I will not include account numbers, passwords, full addresses, or other unnecessary personal data. My jurisdiction is [England and Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland]. My debt information and correspondence are: [paste redacted details here].

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.