Debt-ridden Labour council and militant binmen who’ve reworked Britain’s second metropolis right into a rat infested garbage tip

I’m too scared to let my grandchildren play in the garden anymore,’ warns elderly Kolpona Begum from the relative safety of her east Birmingham front porch.

‘Rats are everywhere. They’re as big as cats. It was absurd to begin with, but now it’s getting dangerous.’

Over two months of intermittent strike action from Birmingham’s bin workers, and the city is on its knees.

Black bin bags are piling up six-feet high on street corners, their contents spooled across the pavement forcing locals – including children on their way to and from school – to walk dangerously close to cars in the road.

All the while, the rotting food has attracted a plague of rats that has left residents fearing for their safety.

In one shocking scene at the top of Gowan Road in the Saltley suburb, a mound of bin bags measures more than 30 feet across which, thanks to the vermin, has become a vile technicolour of mouldy food, loose packaging and dirty sanitary products.

As an elderly male resident put it to the Mail: ‘It’s like living in a prison. But instead of bars, we’ve got bin bags. There’s been nothing like it since ’78.’

Indeed the scenes here in Birmingham today are hauntingly reminiscent of the Winter of Discontent, when hundreds of thousands of public sector workers walked out over stagnant wages and rampant inflation.

In the autumn of 1978, bin bags, fruit crates, milk bottles and cardboard boxes piled high on street corners as binmen downed tools. And 47 years later, the situation could soon be even worse.

Certainly, for the more than one million Brummies already affected by the continuing refuse strikes, things are only set to deteriorate. 

At 6am on Tuesday this week, just shy of 400 bin workers began their latest bout of industrial action, describing it as an ‘indefinite, all-out strike’.

As the threat to public health becomes unconscionable, the question is: how on earth could this happen?

The story begins back in September 2023 when Labour-run Birmingham City Council effectively declared itself bankrupt after being hit with an unserviceable £760million bill to settle a string of equal-pay claims from disgruntled employees.

Then, in February 2024, £300million worth of cuts were announced, alongside a stomach-churning 21 per cent rise in council tax over two years. 

Like all council-funded departments, refuse workers were asked to make concessions, which included changes to routes, cuts to overtime pay and reductions in night-time allowances. 

Bin collections were also reduced from a weekly to fortnightly occurrence.

But the real drama began towards the end of last year when the council announced further cuts by abolishing ‘Waste Recycling and Collection Officers’ – an oversight and safety role. 

The Unite union representing the binmen argued this would lead to pay cuts of up to £8,000 for some 150 workers – something Birmingham City Council denied.

The battle lines had been drawn. On January 6 this year, 350 bin workers staged the first in a series of walkouts, wreaking havoc across the city.

Councillors fanned the flames of discontent in early February when they voted through their own inflation-busting 5.7 per cent pay rise. 

On February 12, refuse workers staged a two-hour protest outside the council building in Birmingham’s Victoria Square.

Little did they know they were still in the foothills of what became a story of national importance. 

For Birmingham City Council then decided to bring in external agency workers to make up the shortfall in collections – something Unite described as ‘disgraceful’ and ‘unlawful’.

On February 26, Unite announced that workers would launch an indefinite ‘all-out’ strike from March 11. 

The day before the action began on Tuesday this week, bin workers also voted in favour of extending strike action through spring and summer.

When the Mail visited this week, refuse workers were picketing outside the Atlas Depot in the south-east of the city, waving red flags and beating a drum. 

A dozen police officers were deployed to keep the peace. Unite says most of the city’s refuse workers are paid between £24,027 and £25,992. 

A Freedom of Information request, meanwhile, revealed the city council is paying an average of £18.44 an hour per worker for agency staff – which comes to £38,400 a year.

The stand-off between the binmen and the council shows no sign of letting up. All the while, it is the residents who are suffering. 

A lady in her 40s from Solihull who calls herself Empress V was visiting her elderly mother in Small Heath when she realised just how bad things had become.

‘The rats are hiding in those bushes there,’ she told the Mail, pointing towards dense shrubbery in front of her mother’s home. 

‘We do have wheelie bins, but they’re overflowing now and the rats are tearing into them.

‘The other problem here is that people from different countries dispose of rubbish differently.

‘Some people just throw anything out and expect someone else to clean it up. They’d leave a mattress on the kerb, for example. 

‘The last thing we need is to give the rats a bed! If I had to collect these bins, I wouldn’t be wearing overalls, I’d be wearing a hazmat suit.’ 

Mohammad Iqbal, who owns Bismillah Supermarket in the suburbs, says he has suffered a downturn in business.

‘As silly as it sounds,’ he said, ‘I believe people are more reluctant to come out because of the smell.’

Outside the market, Bert, 66, shakes his head in despair when asked about the bin strikes: ‘This is what England has come to.

‘They’re sending billions of pounds off to fight foreign wars and all the while the country turns into a rubbish tip.’

Debbie, a 30-year-old from the suburb of Saltley, has a more harrowing story than most. 

It was in February this year that she saw a rat ‘the size of a cat’ charge across her living-room floor. She called Citizens Advice and eventually a specialist was sent round.

But if the shock of the rodent wasn’t enough, Debbie was then charged £35 for pest control to put down some rat poison. 

In the student district of Selly Oak – now labelled ‘Smelly Oak’ – English Literature student Zoe Lukalski has her own concerns.

‘I do believe it causes people to litter,’ she said. ‘Why put stuff in a bin if it’s just going to sit there?’

Labour MP Sonia Kumar broke ranks to admit ‘the people of Birmingham are suffering’. 

The MP for Dudley added: ‘We need to work collaboratively with the unions and the stakeholders to get this over the line.’

Meanwhile, the pest control industry is booming. Anthony Nicol, director of Birmingham Pest Control Ltd, said demand for his services warranted ‘ordering additional bait stations to meet the growing need’.

There appears to be no quick solution. Locals are so concerned that a petition demanding the council ‘take immediate action to resolve the ongoing failures’ has garnered over 5,000 signatures in four weeks. 

Should another four weeks pass with no resolution, parts of this city may become little more than open sewers.