Birmingham bin collections not back to normal, politicians say
Opposition politicians have rejected claims that Birmingham's bin collections are mostly back to normal, as industrial action continues across the city. Refuse workers from the Unite union started an all-out strike in March due to a dispute with the city council over changes to roles and pay.It has attracted worldwide coverage with images of large waste piles and claims of rats as big as cats, but the council said it had cleared the vast majority of rubbish. However, speaking on the BBC's Politics Midlands programme, Birmingham's Conservative leader councillor Robert Alden and Independent MP Ayoub Khan both denied this was the case.
Delayed collections during the initial weeks of the strike were down partly to picket lines blocking trucks from leaving waste facilities. Striking workers insisted they were only stopping lorries if they had safety concerns, but ugly scenes prompted Labour council leader John Cotton to condemn what he called "violence".
Speaking on Friday - as a "mega picket" of union members was present at Lifford Lane depot in Kings Norton - Alden said he believed bin lorries had stalled again. He said: "What we've seen sadly over the last two weeks, since national support from the army has been withdrawn, [is that] bin lorries have not been going out again. "Indeed by the end of the week, barely any bin lorries were going out and that's leading to more rubbish starting to build up on the streets."
Khan, who is a Birmingham councillor as well MP for Perry Barr, also claimed many thousands of tonnes of rubbish were still on the streets. "You see the frustration across the whole city," he said. "Recyclable material hasn't been collected."What [striking bin workers] are saying is very simple: 'We've got mortgages to pay, we've got children to raise. The cost of living is going through the roof and we just want a fair deal.'"
Rachel Taylor, the Labour MP for North Warwickshire and Bedworth, accused the pair of trying to score political points. "The government [has] stepped in and put their weight behind the city council to get bin lorries out and rubbish collected," she said. "There's a reasonable offer on the table and it is in the interests of all the people in Birmingham that all parties get around the table and get this sorted."
Birmingham City Council said it had cleared 100% of the large piles of waste in the hot spot areas and 85% across the rest of the city. While recycling collections remain suspended, it has urged residents to continue putting out household waste bins for collection. "Before industrial action began, our crews were collecting about 1,000 to 1,100 tonnes of waste per day," the local authority's website reads. "However, in recent weeks, our crews have collected 1,500 to 1,700 tonnes of waste each day, with a reduced team."This highlights the need for transformation in the service we provide to residents."
Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
26 minutes ago
- BBC News
Kent County Council Doge head quit due to 'doubt' over project
The tech entrepreneur who quit heading up Reform UK's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) says he did so because the resignation of the party's chairman left him with "a bit of doubt" about the future of the 11 months in the role, Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf resigned on Thursday alongside Nathaniel Fried, who was said to be leading the unit. Speaking to Politics South East, Mr Fried said the outgoing chairman was "spearheading" the Doge initiative and expressed concerns that the scheme "might not turn out how I wanted it to" without councillors at Kent County Council (KCC) have said it is "business as usual" following the double resignation. KCC deputy leader Brian Collins said "absolutely nothing's changed" following the double departure."We have a focus, we have a mission, that mission hasn't changed, business as usual," he told BBC South East on Friday Mr Yusuf and Mr Fried were part of the Doge team which attended its first meeting at KCC on said the meeting was "very productive" but the party admitted it did not know how long it would take for the unit to produce scheme, modelled on the Doge unit created by billionaire Elon Musk as part of Donald Trump's second term as US president, aims to identify and eliminate wasteful to claims that the "engine room" of the unit had now been lost, Mr Collins said: "The engine room is the 57 councillors that have been elected to run this council." 'Circus coming to town' Conservative councillor Sarah Hudson described the current situation as a "mockery".She said: "It's like a circus coming to town, and then you've got various clowns, and they've thrown their toys out of the pram at the first issue that's come along."Mr Fried said he took on the project for free because he felt the "social contract between tax payers and the British government has been a little bit broken".Asked what people in Kent would make of the resignations, just four days into the project, he said he was sure they were "disappointed"."I have great confidence in the local councillors who are working very hard at the moment, especially the head of the council," he said."I'm sure that people are disappointed but thus is politics."A spokesperson for Reform UK said: "The work of the Reform UK Doge unit will continue. The team is larger than just one man."Many Reform-controlled councils already have their respective Doge cabinet members, so this work was happening before and will continue after."
The Independent
37 minutes ago
- The Independent
Most new homes will need solar panels under Government plans
New Homes in England will be required to have solar panels and low-carbon heating systems under the Future Homes Standard (FHS) to be published this autumn. The FHS aims to reduce carbon emissions from new housing, addressing the UK's carbon footprint from gas heating in Homes. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband stated that solar panels could save households hundreds of pounds on energy bills, making their installation a common-sense requirement. The government says the measures will help cut household energy bills and boost the nation's energy security, with typical Homes potentially saving around £530 a year by installing rooftop solar. While the government isn't banning gas boilers, the FHS mandates minimum energy efficiency criteria, effectively requiring greener heating systems in new builds, and recent planning rule changes have made heat pump installations easier.
The Guardian
42 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The most pointless role in UK politics? The secretary of state for Wales
In the space of one week, Labour-run Wales has been short-changed by Labour-run Westminster on projects from rail funding to national insurance contributions. The poorest nation in the UK is being let down. Repeatedly. But what is to be done? What we need is a hero. Someone whose job is to speak up for Wales in cabinet, to be Cymru's voice in Westminster's corridors of power. Luckily for Wales, there is such a person – the secretary of state for Wales. Unluckily for Wales, this role has long been utterly obsolete. Rather than being the voice of Wales in cabinet, it far more often represents the voice of the cabinet in Wales. It needs to go. Wales didn't have its own secretary of state until 1964. The Scots, meanwhile, were given that voice more than 250 years before in 1707, though it was subsequently abolished three decades later and then recreated in 1926. When Wales did finally get one, it was a real cause for celebration and the culmination of much campaigning. The first two people in the post were Jim Griffiths and Cledwyn Hughes, who were highly respected and had great credentials within the Labour movement. The new role paid dividends and within the space of three years the Welsh Language Act was passed, giving Welsh legal status in Wales (amazing what happens when you give people a voice). But in the following decades there were some absolute stinkers in the job. The next one was George Thomas, who was anti Welsh language and described the setting up of the Welsh Office as the 'greatest mistake'. The low point of his tenure came after the Aberfan disaster, in which a coal tip collapsed on to a school killing 116 children and 28 adults. Subsequent inquiries found that the National Coal Board was squarely responsible for these deaths after refusing to pay for the removal of the tips. After the disaster, 88,000 individual contributions were received for the victim fund but the Labour UK government decided to take money from that fund and use it to clear the remaining tips. Thomas put pressure on the fund to give in. Over the subsequent decades, many of the people holding the role were not even Welsh or in a Welsh constituency. (Imagine if they had tried to do that to the Scots.) The worst of these was the Conservative John Redwood, who was born in Kent and was MP for Wokingham in Berkshire. (If you want a treat, dig out the video of him failing to mime the Welsh national anthem.) Redwood refused to sign documents that were written in Welsh, and didn't like to stay overnight in Wales, instead driving back to his constituency in England. But perhaps most damning was that, in a country with significant levels of poverty, he took great pride in returning £100m of the Welsh Office's budget to the Treasury unspent. What an effective voice for Wales in cabinet. More recently, Wales has been blessed with some equally diligent secretaries of state. One was Alun Cairns, who resigned from the post after it emerged that one of his staff was accused by a judge of deliberately sabotaging a rape trial. His best-known contribution was a supreme act of brown nosing when he got the Severn Bridge renamed the 'Prince of Wales Bridge' – a decision that only 17% of people in Wales supported. Another was Simon Hart, who admits in his just-published diaries that, at the official opening of the new Welsh parliament in 2020: 'I skip the Senedd bit – partly in protest, and partly to have lunch with Adam.' He doesn't say what he was protesting about. Another recent office holder was Robert Buckland who was, err, the MP for South Swindon … While Wales has had some shocking secretaries of state, this isn't why the role should be ditched. It needs to be gone because, however principled, competent and driven the holder of the office, there is no way they can realistically do the job of being Wales's voice. They have no power, barely any staff, are appointed by the prime minister and bound by collective responsibility. The current situation represents the worst of both worlds: it gives the illusion of Wales having a voice when it comes with a pre-installed mute button. The current holder of the office is Jo Stevens. Speaking to people in other departments as well as the Wales Office, I get the impression that she is at least proactive in making Wales's needs part of the conversation. I am told she has been focused in trying to get the historic injustices on rail funding remedied ahead of next week's spending review. Whether it works remains to be seen – and she sadly failed this week to prevent the new rail project between Oxford and Cambridge being classed as an 'England and Wales' scheme, meaning that Wales will not receive Barnett consequentials from it. But at least she isn't openly contemptuous of Welsh democracy like many of her predecessors. The fact remains, however, that whether or not Welsh issues are raised in Whitehall is totally dependent on the whims of a cabinet member who is appointed and often living outside Wales. That's a terrible status quo. Wales should appoint its advocates, not the prime minister, who has only once in the history of the UK been Welsh. The role of secretary of state for Wales needs to be replaced by a representative of the Welsh government, which is directly elected by the people of Wales. Better still, we need to properly reform the UK so the UK government doesn't double as the English government. Devolution gave Wales and Scotland a voice, and that voice should reverberate around the cabinet table. It is long past the time that Whitehall needs to acknowledge that the UK is made up of distinct countries. Giving these nations a real voice doesn't weaken the union, it strengthens it. Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
