‘Five months of bin strikes under Labour has turned us into a rat village'

Telegraph

21 hours ago

It is two days into a heatwave in Birmingham, and as the temperature rises throughout the morning, so does the stench. This week, the city's residents marked an unhappy anniversary: it has been five months since the Unite union declared an all-out bin strike, leading to rubbish piling metres high in the streets.
No agreement has been reached in the weeks or months since. Talks between Unite and the Labour-run council, which declared effective bankruptcy in 2023, are deadlocked. The council has paid nearly £8 million in agency costs to keep a skeleton bin service running – meanwhile, the union has warned that action could last until Christmas.
The evidence of Birmingham's bin crisis may now be a little better hidden as a result of agency workers, but if you want to see the rats, you need only ask.
'This way,' says Joseph, a 22-year-old who heard us talking outside a newsagent. He lives in Highgate, a densely populated central neighbourhood that he says has turned into a 'rat village'. Down one back alley he shows us on his surprisingly cheerful bin tour of the neighbourhood – steaming, rotting rubbish spills from piles of bin bags higher than the boundary walls that struggle to contain them. It is not hard to spot the rats, which scavenge in the waste in broad daylight.
'At night it's like New York,' says another resident, who doesn't wish to be named. In the past three months, bin collectors 'came once and took half of it,' he says. 'And then they didn't come back again.' He blames the council. 'It's not the workers. It's the council that should be ultimately responsible.'
The worst of the built-up bin bags have been removed from the city's residential streets, but even in the most affluent pockets of the city, the recycling hasn't been collected in three months. 'It definitely feels like a class thing,' says Louis Hudson, who lives in nearby Moseley.
'Where I live, the bins are collected every week or two weeks, and I have a car so I can take extra waste to the tip. Here, where it's so overcrowded, it piles up quickly.' Another passer-by says: 'You're grateful when it's not hot, because the smell isn't so bad. The black bins are fine [where I live] now, but it's the recycling that hasn't been collected since Christmas. We go to the tip every two weeks.'
This has become a tale of two cities, where the wealthier neighbourhoods are free from rubbish and the poorer districts are left with mounds of waste. In Sparkbrook, the city's most deprived ward, Tesfay Getachew is mopping the area in front of the restaurant and café he owns – a fairly thankless endeavour given there are wheelie bins spilling rotting waste into the litter-strewn street just a couple of yards away. While he is talking, I spot a dumped bin liner that almost looks like it's moving. We watch as it splits and hundreds of maggots – I believe the collective noun is a 'grumble' – spill, wriggling onto the pavement.
'We are losing customers, especially in this hard time – they cross the road [to avoid the rubbish],' he says. The worst part, the real stinker, is that the waste is not even his own. Getachew pays the council around £700 a year for the collection of his own wheelie bin, which is empty. However, one side effect of the bin strike is that it is open season for fly-tippers, who now come at night and dump waste in the neighbouring bins. 'But who is facing the problem? Me,' he says.
Isaac Solomon, who runs a barbershop on the same road, says his bins have not been collected in a month. The rubbish has had a similarly devastating impact on his business. 'You've got six bins in front of the shop, so you can't even see in,' he says. It is quite literally blocked by rubbish. 'This one has been three months,' he says, motioning to an overspilling wheelie bin. 'I've even offered to pay for a private collection, but they won't take it.'
Birmingham City Council says that collections have been made across the city, and that fly-tipping is a separate issue. 'Our contingency for waste collection during this industrial action is enough to maintain a single weekly collection to each property in the city, but because of pickets blocking depots, they have been deployed much later and, therefore, for shorter working periods,' a spokesperson said. 'As certain depots were able to get more wagons out than others, this led to an uneven collection across the city.'
One other solution offered by the council is mobile waste lorries and collection points, which became so overwhelmed when they opened that the police were called to try and control the scene. There is, however, one type of business that is thriving as a result: auto repair centres have reportedly seen a boom in trade as people come in for repairs on their cars, which have had the wiring chewed through by rats.
The council has drawn criticism for expending efforts on matters that are seemingly less relevant to its core duties, such as the 77th anniversary of Pakistan's independence, while the strike remains unresolved. Commenting on an X post from the council this week, which announced the Library of Birmingham would be lit green and white to celebrate Pakistani independence, the Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake wrote: 'At least the bins are getting emptied… Oh wait….'
Meanwhile, the Birmingham Mail reported that the council had urged residents to avoid putting flags on lamp-posts, following the appearance of Union and England flags in neighbourhoods in different parts of the city.
It was on March 11 this year that Unite bin workers began an all-out strike in Birmingham. Waste lorries are staffed by a driver and three workers at the back, who collect and empty the bins. In Birmingham, two of these were loaders and one was a waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO). The dispute centres on the council's decision to abolish this WRCO role, which was paid more than other refuse workers.
The union claimed the role is 'safety critical', and that 170 affected workers faced losing up to £8,000 a year as a result of the decision. The council, meanwhile, has argued that the role actually only came about as the result of a previous bin strike and that no other council in the country has such a role.
The WRCO role has also opened the council up to the mother of all equal pay disputes. Lawyers at Leigh Day, acting on behalf of female council workers in Birmingham, successfully argued that jobs like WRCOs didn't actually have any additional responsibilities.
They were simply benefitting from 'job enrichment' that came with higher pay afforded to people in the council's typically male-dominated roles (refuse collection) and not in the roles dominated by women (eg social care and cleaning). By 2023, it had already paid £1.1bn in compensation claims, and last December agreed in principle to a further £250m settlement to 6,000 women. If the role is brought back, further claims against the already bankrupt council could be brought.
Unite, however, will not back down. Initial talks in April ended without resolution; rubbish piled up in the streets and there was talk of 'rats the size of cats'. MPs spoke of a looming public health crisis. Talks were held again in May, via the conciliation service ACAS, but again ended without resolution. Last month, the council confirmed that negotiations had ended for good.
In a sign of just how bitter negotiations have become, Unite members took the extraordinary step of voting to expel long-term member Angela Rayner from the union as a result of her handling of the dispute. '[She] refuses to get involved, and she is directly aiding and abetting the fire-and-rehire of these bin workers,' Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said in an interview. 'It is totally and utterly abhorrent.'
I catch a passing street collector to ask him about why negotiations have ground on for so long without resolution. He is a Unite member and ex-bin collector, so wishes to stay anonymous. 'I'd never say this to the lads, because I don't want any trouble, but truthfully, the council is right,' he says. 'The only difference between the grade two [bin collector] role and the grade three [WRCO] role is that the grade three can press a button that flips the wheelie bin into a refuse van, and the grade two can't… they're essentially the same job.' Unite would point out that WRCOs have other additional responsibilities, such as collecting data on a tablet.
He also points out that cuts have been made across the city – to parks, public services and social care roles – and so bin workers shouldn't be the only ones exempt. 'I'm with Unite, and when I first joined I felt I had to strike with them because I had just got a permanent contract, but the argument over this has been going on since before I even started working for them,' he says. 'Ultimately, I just feel very sorry for the people who live in these areas – I was here when bin bags were piled as high as that fence.' Meanwhile, the city's bin collectors are still on the picket line.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: 'The government is committed to supporting Birmingham's long-term transformation, and to a sustainable resolution of the equal pay issues which have been left unresolved for far too long. We have worked intensively with the council to tackle any backlogs and clean up the streets in the interests of Birmingham residents and public health. Our position remains clear: Unite should suspend the strike, and work with the council on a sustainable way forward.'