Exactly four months since all-out strike action began in Birmingham, piles of rotting waste – and rats – continue to blight its neighbourhoods.
Cramped inner city areas such as Small Heath and Bordesley Green have been most affected – and today they were literally overflowing with rubbish.
In some streets, such as Carlton Road, residents have taken to dumping their household waste in a pile at the end of the road.
This means that only those houses have to contend with the stinking rubbish in a city where temperatures are currently 32C in the middle of the day.
A woman from Somalia living in the Small Heath side-street said sanitary conditions were far worse than in her native country, telling the Mail: ‘The Government should sort this out.’
Gesturing to one of the many overflowing wheelie bins lined up outside the terraced houses, she added: ‘I can’t fit these bins in my car so I double bag my rubbish and drive it to the tip. But many people along here just carry them to the end of the road and dump them there.
‘It isn’t fair on the people that live down that end of the street. I see big rats often now. I used to see them sometimes but now it is all of the time. In Somalia I never saw a rat – it is very clean there.’
Strikes began in January following the scrapping of a waste recycling and collection officer role. All-out action followed on March 11.
Exactly four months since all-out strike action began in Birmingham, piles of rotting waste – and rats – continue to blight its neighbourhoods
Random rubbish is gathered on street corners amid the 32C heatwave
‘I see big rats often now. I used to see them sometimes but now it is all of the time. In Somalia I never saw a rat – it is very clean there’
Strikes began in January following the scrapping of a waste recycling and collection officer role (Pictured: striking refuse collectors from the UNITE trade union attend their picket line on July 9)
Ironically, living in the house nearest to the pile of bin bags on the end of Carlton Road is a Birmingham City Council waste operative.
Iqbal Khezar, 30, spends his days tackling fly tipping for the Labour-run authority but told the Mail it was ‘horrible having to see this rubbish outside my house. There are plenty of rats running about’.
Around the corner on Victoria Street, a pile of bin bags dumped on a verge underneath a tree had been ripped open by rodents, with the waste spilling out.
Further up the road, somebody had dumped an old fridge-freezer and a mattress beside a similar pile of rotting waste.
A short distance away in Balsall Green, the Mail encountered one of the worst waste mountains in Grove Cottage Road. A child’s car seat, a wooden chair, flat-pack furniture off-cuts and even the underfloor storage area from a car boot joined mattresses, fridges and divan bases in being fly tipped on the waste land.
Resident Ahmed, 25, said the tree-studded patch of dead grass had been a magnet for fly-tippers long before the bin strike.
His friend Shakwar Khan, 26, added: ‘People started dumping their bin bags there during the strike and then others followed. Sometimes it gets collected but that seems to encourage people to just dump more waste here.’
While the toll of the Birmingham bin strike was in evidence in these neighbourhoods yesterday, in nearby areas such as Moseley and Sparkbrook there was little to suggest the city council was still being held to ransom by Unite.
Huge piles of rubbish has gathered at the end of street corners after bin men have been on strike for the last four months
Bags, boxes, bed frames and broken furniture is dumped on the pavement
Mounds of rubbish photographed yesterday morning in Fraser Road, Sparkhill, had been cleared by the time the Mail visited.
Birmingham City Council said it had been able to ‘deploy our fleet in full and on time to collect waste in Birmingham’ since securing an injunction in May to prevent the obstruction of bin lorries.
It added: ‘All excess waste has now been removed… and we have returned to scheduled collections within our contingency plan, meaning one collection per week for every household.’
