The children are just a few feet away. I can hear them on the other side of the fence. Fortunately, I can’t see them so they can’t see me and, more importantly, what’s in front of me.
But they must be able to smell it: a mountain of leaking bin bags, foul-smelling waste sacks, suppurating wheelie-bins and industrial waste carts full to overflowing.
It’s a sickly whiff of what a wine critic might describe as compost, chip fat and old socks with notes of cheese, onion and fox.
This is the scene immediately behind the children’s nursery on Highfield Road in Hall Green, Birmingham. You will find much the same right across an entire city, where an all-out strike by the council’s bin collectors is now entering its fourth week. The resulting mess has swiftly descended from an inconvenience to a disgrace to a full-scale crisis.
Two days ago, Birmingham City Council declared a ‘major incident’. This might seem a tad over-dramatic, the sort of thing you might hear from a governor of a US state which has just been flattened by a tornado, rather than a team of West Midlands jobsworths confronted with some over-ripe sacks of cat litter, eggshells and pizza boxes.
But then again the city’s streets are buried under 17,000 tons of rubbish.
A ‘major incident’ is officially categorised by the emergency services as ‘an event or situation with a range of serious consequences which requires special arrangements to be implemented by one or more emergency responder agency’.
In the case of Birmingham City Council, however, this has the added advantage of enabling council staff to seek extra emergency support from other authorities (including the Army). This is particularly useful as Birmingham City Council is, in effect, bankrupt.
Robert Hardman visited Birmingham, where the streets are piled high with rubbish due to bin collectors being on strike
Here on the ground, with summer approaching and temperatures rising, the locals are grateful for all the help they can get. Hall Green shopkeeper Azad Khan would certainly regard the overflowing vats of putrid God-knows-what next to his shop on Baldwins Lane as a ‘major incident’.
As he points out, if it is not cleared soon, then someone will have to don a biological hazmat suit to tackle it.
I hear countless stories of ‘rats as big as cats’ (luckily, I do not encounter one). The locals call them ‘Squeaky Blinders’, an homage to the Brum-based period gang drama of (almost) the same name. Residents tell me that even if you want to load your car with fermenting rubbish and take it to a council tip, it can take days to book the mandatory online appointment.
Some of those who succeed talk of seeing council tips surprisingly empty, fuelling rumours that some strikers have taken to booking up slots and then deliberately not using them. It’s hard to verify this.
When I turn up at one of the main tips at Lifford Lane and start talking to a chap emptying the boot of his car, a heavy in hi-vis instantly appears from the control room and orders me off the premises on the grounds that I am a journalist.
I know my trade always comes near the bottom of those public approval polls but it’s the first time I have been formally deemed more objectionable than a sack of old nappies or the local vermin. At least the rats are able to run around with impunity.
What makes this mess so interesting – and so depressing for the poor residents – is the scale of everything. Birmingham is the largest unitary authority in Europe and it has steadfastly kept its rubbish collection in-house, long after other councils have subcontracted their bins to outside firms.
It is important to stress that the city itself is not bankrupt. However, the grand old Town Hall, once a powerhouse of the British Empire, is skint following a trilogy of blunders by the Labour-run council.
A botched property development ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games lost an estimated £320 million, while the cackhanded introduction of a disastrous computer system swallowed another £150 million. Most costly of all has been the historical scandal of unequal pay for female staff, leaving the council liable for £760 million.
It might be a Labour council but a Labour government is certainly not going to help. With the economy on a cliff edge, Rachel Reeves knows that bailing out incompetent local authorities could take the UK right back to the late Seventies.
In those days it was the fabled ‘Winter of Discontent’ – when rubbish strikes like this were a nationwide malaise – that helped propel Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street in 1979. Labour was out of power for 18 years. As far as Sir Keir Starmer and his cohorts are concerned, it’s a case of ‘bin there, done that and not again’.
In any case, some of Birmingham’s MPs seem more preoccupied with other issues. Last week, the Labour MP for Hall Green, Tahir Ali, was busy campaigning for a new airport 4,000 miles away in Kashmir because ‘a number of my constituents are having to drive over three hours to get to the nearest airport in Pakistan’.
Right now, Brum is making me almost nostalgic. All these picket lines and piles of rubbish are so Seventies I find myself humming the theme tune to Crossroads.
Neither the council nor the Unite union, which represents the 350 striking binmen, are in any mood for compromise. The council says it wants to remove a specific role from each rubbish truck – the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO) who is, nominally, the health and safety functionary.
Given that every lorry now has closed-circuit cameras and all crew members are trained in health and safety anyway, the council wants these people to retrain or redeploy or take voluntary redundancy. The union invokes the usual pieties, saying this is a grave dereliction of duty to safety though, when I talk to the strikers, it’s all about loss of pay and promotion.
It will mean that a Grade 2 bin-emptier cannot aspire to be a Grade 3 WRCO. The strikers call this an £8,000 pay cut. The council calls it the real world.
A number of agency workers are still managing to take lorries out on the road. In years gone by, we might have seen angry scenes with union heavies in donkeyjackets chanting ‘Scab!’ at the strike-breakers and stories of intimidation.
Unite union members slow-walk in front of bin lorries while on strike
Streets have become a dumping ground which bring foxes and rats to the area
Today’s strike tactics are more crafty – and effective, too. The binmen hang around the gates of the truck depots and do not quite block them.
They just walk very slowly up and down in front of the gates and then shuffle along in front of the lorries on the roads outside. It means that it takes each lorry up to two hours to get out of the lorry park and on its rounds.
I turn up mid-morning at the main depot in Tyseley. A queue of trucks which should have been out on their rounds at dawn is still trundling along at what is, quite literally, a snail’s pace behind a trio of dawdling, limping foot-draggers.
In the early days of this strike, there were flashes of abuse and argy-bargy but around a dozen police are content to stand around and watch.
This is a flagrant obstruction to the King’s Highway but there will be no action as long as no one is threatening anyone else and the trucks are allowed on their way – eventually.
‘We’re not asking for more pay,’ says one slow-walker called Brian. ‘We just want to keep our existing pay.’
When all the trucks have finally left at lunchtime, the strikers pack up and the police can leave. By now, what was already a much-reduced service has used up much of its permitted shift time anyway.
Some trucks will head straight for one of the two pop-up waste collection points which the council announces each day. Here, agency crews will take pretty much anything off residents if they can bring it along themselves.
This turned ugly the other day in Moseley when so many people turned up that there was an outbreak of rubbish rage.
The problem is that, once these trucks are full – and they fill quickly – they have to go to a tip like Lifford Lane to offload. Here, again, are teams of slow-walkers who prevent them getting out for another two hours while another batch of happy coppers hang around doing nothing very much.
I ask one of the Unite union officials if he is not worried that a long, smelly summer of discontent might not finally push this council – despite its Labour majority – towards a decision to privatise the bin operation once and for all.
‘Who’s going to sign a contract with a city that’s bankrupt?’ he replies. ‘This operation needs investment and money and there isn’t any.’
Today, I find a good-natured pop-up mobile operation on Beilby Road in Stirchley, where two lorries are doing a roaring trade. No police are needed.
Some people have dragged their wheelie-bins long distances and look almost triumphant as they see them flipped up towards the crushers. Cars screech up, packed full as if ready for a summer holiday. A few moments later, their drivers have a skip in their step, almost pathetically grateful to be rid of their accumulated filth.
Some are cross about the industrial action. ‘I can’t afford to strike,’ says cleaner, Yvonne Rowland, who has arrived with all her mother’s rubbish. ‘In my view, if you have the money to strike, then you’re doing OK.’
Richard Sherriff, an estate surveyor, pins the blame on the management. ‘These binmen aren’t tax avoiders. They’ve just been mismanaged by people playing politics.’
There is not the faintest pretence about recycling. People are feeding sacks of kitchen waste into the crushers along with old furniture, chip board, plants and plastic toys.
One man turns up and throws in a kitchen sink. Everyone is very polite and grateful to the agency crews who are a cheerful bunch.
I meet the Labour councillor for this ward, Mary Lock, who is in a hi-vis bib and has been publicising this morning’s bring-your-own trash opportunity. She accepts that the strike is problematic but insists the council is doing the right thing.
‘We have had to do unpalatable things but that’s because we have had cuts of over a billion pounds over the last 14 and a half years,’ she explains.
However, the old pin-it-all-on the Tories multi-purpose excuse is about as stale as the peelings in another ripped bin liner in Hall Green. There I meet long-serving Tory councillor, Tim Huxtable, who is the opposition environment spokesman on the council and knows the bin service well, having been in charge of it during a brief period of Tory/Lib Dem coalition control 15 years ago.
‘We balanced our books but those days are long gone,’ he tells me, over a cup of coffee at the Baldwin Arms pub.
A few days ago, he helped organise a pop-up collection in the pub car park here. ‘They weighed it all and we’d collected 51.4 tons of rubbish,’ he says proudly, adding that it had been something of a community gathering. ‘The pub were giving out free bacon sarnies to the lorry crews.’
He explains that this strike has roots going back many years.
Indeed, rubbish disputes are a part of Brum civic folklore. Long before the advent of the bin liner, the bins were overflowing when the dustmen (as they were called back then) walked out in 1968.
The council issued special guidance for residents: press your cans flat to save space, burn all paper or clothing and bury old food ‘covering it with soil’. Easy enough in the days when most people had a garden I suppose.
During the Seventies, rubbish strikes continued. By the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher’s zeal for privatisation meant that many local authorities soon realised it was cheaper and easier usually to subcontract rubbish collecting.
But Birmingham kept the trucks and the binmen (they were nearly all men) in-house. The wages made it a handsome earner, when complicated overtime arrangements were added. In 2008, a binman could make £45,000, more than a Captain in the Army. Mr Huxtable and his colleagues put a stop to that.
In 2017, with Labour rule restored, there was another major dispute. The introduction of the WRCO role was part of the secret deal which helped end it.
However, that led on to another bin strike in 2019 after it emerged the council had been doing different under-the-counter deals with different unions. Once again, it cost millions to clean up the mess – politically and literally.
In other words, Brum is used to this smell – and the nickname ‘Skip City’.
Tim Huxtable takes me to nearby Redstone Farm Road on the edge of the city. One side is festooned with filth, rat droppings and an old fridge. The other is spotless.
That is because it is in Tory-controlled Solihull and receives weekly (privatised) collections. It is another glaring example of a two-tier Britain.
HGV driver Dorin Baban pops out of his door in the hope that I might be from the council. He tells me of his despair after seeing the mess pile up week upon week.
After several years of living here, having moved from Romania, via Italy, he says Britain feels over and this is the final straw. ‘I think I will move soon and bring up my daughter somewhere safer.’
The local elections are a month away. There are no polls here in Birmingham but Tory leader Kemi Badenoch could do a lot worse than simply walk up and down Redstone Farm Road in a hi-vis bib.