Walk through parts of Sparkbrook and you feel almost claustrophobic with all the overflowing wheelie bins waiting to be emptied. Fixed to the wall of the mosque on Formans Road, I spot a large sign saying: ‘Absolutely No Dumping. This Is A Mosque (Worship Place). Please Respect The Place.’ Below it, are a dozen bulging black sacks, a couple of carry cots and a crate of lord knows what.
I find it hard to imagine what this place will look like in the summer. That is when Birmingham City Council plans to double the number of household bins and halve the number of collections – although it may not make a huge difference in some parts of the city where collections seem fairly hit-and-miss anyway.
There seems little prospect of a resolution any time soon. For one year into the great Birmingham bin strike, the strikers have just been joined on the picket line by agency workers hired to clean up the mess they left behind.
Next month, plans are in hand for a ‘megapicket’ when trade unionists from all over the country – plus far-Left activists such as Jeremy Corbyn – are due to descend on the waste depots currently struggling to maintain the most basic rubbish service.
The Labour-run council’s response to all this is optimistic, to say the least. This month, it voted to give half a million homes across the city an extra wheelie bin plus an extra food bin to sit alongside the two wheelie bins they already have. The grand idea is to hit mandatory new government-imposed recycling targets.
Yet this is a city which cannot hit existing targets. Indeed, Birmingham currently boasts the worst recycling rates in Britain – hardly surprising given that it has not collected cardboard or glass for almost a year.
My immediate concern, however, is how some of these residents are going to get in and out of their houses. For each address will have to park four bins with a combined volume of 623 litres in front of their homes. That’s an awful lot of space taken up on each doorstep. It equates to more than the entire boot space of a Volvo family estate. Put another way, it is the equivalent to 1,100 pints of milk.
While food leftovers will be collected once a week, everything else – including nappies, cat litter, fat, oil and packaging – will be collected fortnightly, provided that the system is working normally.
Right now, it most definitely is not.
The current bin strike is believed to be the longest all-out British strike of the 21st century. Underlying it is a more fundamental problem: the council is bust and in special measures.
It was this time last year that 350 refuse workers voted to take industrial action. The council had announced plans to abolish a bin-collecting role unique to Birmingham called the ‘waste recycling and collection officer’ (WRCO).
Nowhere else in Britain has this particular officer class. It was a made-up role created to end a previous strike but it proved to be a Trojan horse, opening the council to punitive charges of unequal pay.
For the WRCOs were almost all men and the pay grade for the job was judged to be higher than that for similar jobs elsewhere performed by women. In the subsequent legal action, the council found itself on the hook for £750million of back pay for female workers, an existential error which has now driven it to financial ruin.
Understandably, however, those WRCOs were furious about their sudden demotion, arguing that it would cost them each up to £8,000 a year. So they downed bins in January of this year. The row escalated to an all-out strike in March. Since then, the binmen have been picketing the council’s truck depots and living off strike pay from their union, Unite.
Talks between the union and the council took a further dive when the bosses also started reassessing the pay grades for drivers. The council turned to agency workers to fill the gaps, resulting in a skeleton service providing a weekly collection of residual waste (the non-recyclable stuff such as food and nappies).
This has, at least, stopped the city degenerating into a festering compost heap, but at an additional cost of at least £1million per month. However, residents are now expected to take all their recyclable waste to the local tip themselves (providing they can pre-book a slot) with the result that Brum’s rates of recycling are now an abysmal, bottom-of-the-league 14 per cent.
For the strikers, it means a pretty bleak and uncertain Christmas. For the Labour leadership on Birmingham City Council, it raises the prospect of a thrashing in the upcoming local elections in May. For the city’s 1.1million residents, it looks like many more months of sporadic collections, rampant fly-tipping and queues for the local tip. And the smell can only get worse from the summer when non-food collections switch from weekly to fortnightly, if indeed there is a collection at all.
By the end of March 2026 – in little more than three months – all councils in England are obliged, by law, to introduce a new system called ‘Simpler Recycling’ which means separating rubbish into four categories. Birmingham is going to be late to the party and has asked for an exemption until the summer. If the industrial action is still not resolved at by then, it will have to create a whole new workforce just to deal with food waste.
‘Residents will see a real difference with the new service,’ says Majid Mahmood, cabinet member for environment and transport. ‘Our crews have the tools they need to deliver a more reliable, efficient service while also supporting the city’s environmental goals, benefiting both residents and staff.’
The leader of the Conservative opposition, Robert Alden, disagrees. ‘The council are just delusional,’ he tells me. ‘How are they going to create two extra forms of recycling when they can’t even operate the one they have at the moment? The first thing they need to do is end this strike and get the city cleaned up.’
If elected in May’s local elections, he says his party would complete the long-term review of Birmingham’s entire waste system which started in 2010 but was never completed. It would include addressing a question which most councils in Britain have already addressed: why employ hundreds on the state payroll to empty the bins when you can pay a contractor to do the same job for less?
That is what has brought me back to Redstone Farm Road. I came here back in March, when the all-out strike began. One side of the road sits in Birmingham, with its state-owned bin service, and the other is in Solihull, which leaves the bins to a contractor. Now, as then, one side of the road has a mouldy duvet, scattered black bags and a patina of crisp packets and empty plastic bottles. One does not. Guess which is which.
Suddenly, I experience what might be called a Groundhog Day moment. The phrase, of course, comes from the 1993 movie in which a man wakes every morning to find that it is always the day before. That is rather how I feel as I come across exactly the same abandoned Beko fridge-freezer lying on its back where I saw it in March. Its doors are now faded and cracked but it is still on the grass verge. Someone from the council has been along to mow the grass around it – but not to shift the fridge.
I hold my breath and gingerly pull open the door. I steel myself for something similar to a groundhog – in as much as it may have brown fur and big teeth. I have heard all the stories about ‘rats as big as cats’ here in Birmingham and would rather not find one. Fortunately, no putrid stench wafts forth as I lift the lid. Inside, are some torn up bits of cardboard, the packaging for a flat-screen telly, bits of an old trellis and what looks like garden waste.
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The Zahra family have had to look at this thing in front of their house for the best part of a year since a flytipper dumped it last winter. Shahzadi Zahra tells me that she reported it to the council ages ago and was told someone would sort it out. No one ever did.
Now, like so many residents of Birmingham, she has given up all expectation that the council will ever take it away. Perhaps, it is now a permanent fixture. In thousands of years, archaeologists will scratch their heads when they excavate the long-lost settlement of Hall Green and wonder why a strange tribe in the middle at of a place known as the West Midlands used to refrigerate its cardboard.
I meet local Tory council candidate Harriet O’Hara, who is behind a campaign called ‘Bring Back Our Bins’, which seeks to make a start by restoring broken litter bins. At present, the council does not have the resources to mend or replace any bins, with the result that the existing bins fill up in no time and then overflow. As for recycling, she says that the booking system for the local tip is so unreliable that she has a novel solution: ‘I’m afraid I take it home to my parents in Derbyshire.’
Her partner, Tim Huxtable, is a serving Tory councillor and opposition environment spokesman. He takes me to a row of shops by Yardley Wood station to point out a familiar problem. The bin by the bus stop has vanished, yet people continue to drop rubbish in the hole where it once stood. Then, a couple of weeks ago, a few binliners were dumped in front of the Ruby Garden takeaway in the middle of the night. Now, it is a black bag mountain.
‘We want a vibrant shopping parade here but look at it now,’ he says. Some bags have split open, one with a trail of what could be breadcrumbs or sand or cat litter. I am not going to check. I spot a newspaper sticking out of one sack. It is dated December 5th, making this bag more than a week old. It is a few yards from Jeff’s Premium Halal Meat. Shopworker Hasnaim Ali tells me that some people will even turn up and dump a bag in broad daylight. ‘You ask them not to but they don’t listen and you don’t want a fight,’ he says.
Customer and stay-at-home mum Saba Abdulla says that the whole area has degenerated since the strike. ‘If you try to reserve a place at the tip, it’s usually booked up. When you finally get there, it’s always half-empty. So why not just remove the booking system so people can turn up whenever?’ It is a very good question. A council spokeswoman explains that it is because of ongoing construction work.
Interestingly Saba, who says she will vote Conservative at the election, is entirely behind the strikers. ‘Just pay them and get over it,’ she says. Across town, I find a similar response at a mobile recycling truck which stops in a different bit of Birmingham each day.
Today it is in a public car park in Pype Hayes. There are two council refuse trucks (run by the non-striking street cleaning department) receiving a steady stream of people off-loading months of rubbish. Teaching assistant Jackie Fitzpatrick has made four trips here today. She won’t be voting Labour in May and is fully supportive of the strikers. ‘Who wants to get up at four in the morning and do what they do?’
Meanwhile, retired administrator David Stokes, wheeling a bin full of garden waste on behalf of an elderly neighbour, says he is leaning towards Reform next time but thinks the binmen have a fair point. ‘Those chaps are worth their weight,’ he says.
The general view seems to be that Birmingham’s bin system may be badly run but slashing anyone’s pay by £8,000 due to managerial incompetence is not on. The union is standing its ground. ‘Instead of wasting millions more of council taxpayers’ money fighting a dispute it could settle justly for a fraction of the cost,’ says Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, ‘the council needs to return to talks.’
The council points out that it has a new, modernised fleet of 151 bin lorries which do not require a WRCO role. ‘Claims that 171 former WRCOs could lose £8,000 a year in pay is incorrect,’ says a council statement, arguing that the sum is nearer £6,000 and only affects 17 people (Unite disputes the maths). ‘No other council has this role, and if the council gave in, then we would risk creating a huge future equal pay liability.’
It might seem extraordinary that an entire city has been blighted for an entire year over an obsolete non-job, especially with the same party, Labour, running both the country and the city. However, it now seems perfectly possible that this dispute could still be rumbling on to the council elections in May.
The race is wide open. But here’s a prediction. If that fridge is still lying outside Mrs Zhara’s house by then, I wager it will be a different party which ends up sorting out this mess.
