“Even when the rubbish is cleared, the rats won’t go quietly. This is Labour’s Birmingham.”
So read the Conservative Party’s post on X, following footage of bin men trying to clear away the piles of rubbish that have accumulated in Birmingham’s streets since the waste disposal crews went on strike on 11th March.
Gradually, and then suddenly: that is how Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt. The proud history of which Birmingham could once boast has been buried under mountains of rubbish, but to see the suddenness of this problem is to ignore the reality that this has been coming for some time.
This may have happened on Labour’s watch, and while it is true that this is a city with a Labour Mayor — Richard Parker, since May 2024 — under a Labour government, this failure is not theirs. In fact, if it should lie anywhere, it should lie at the feet of the Conservatives.
I moved to Birmingham at the very beginning of my academic career, as a first year undergraduate student, in 2014. I would remain there for eight years, until I completed my PhD in 2022, during which time I watched (like the outsider I always felt) as the city degenerated.
Even then, I used to joke that the endless litter that huddled under bushes or drifted at the edge of the highways was “urban foliage”, falling just as regularly and remaining similarly unswept. But the sardonic romanticism I tried to cling to was eroded as I moved to Selly Oak, the student village overlooking the university campus. Smelly Oak, as it was known, was lousy with rubbish: mattresses squatted in the miniature “front gardens”, takeaway wrappers and boxes were stepped over every morning, and broken glass winked at you every evening as the sun would set.
Nobody really cared, and usually the blame was placed on the bin men — reasonably so, I think, given that they refused point blank to take any bin bags not in a black bin, leaving them for rats to disembowel. More egregiously, they refused to empty any black bin that was “overflowing”, i.e. would not shut. One time, I argued with a bin man that surely the fact they were overflowing means they needed to be emptied. That went as well as you can imagine.
As time moved on, and the glaring lack of regular rubbish bins became noticeable, I began to see it encroach into the leafy ‘burbs of Birmingham’s “nicer” districts. I moved to Harborne during my Master’s, which was historically rather poor but had become a respectable middle-class part of the city with a thriving high street and many leafy spaces. But even here, the problem was just as obvious, though mildly less irritating. There were discarded cans, forgotten crisp packets, fag-ends all over the place. The problem was still there, it was just less obvious.
During the Covid pandemic, I would regularly walk around a local park with my dog — an activity that became increasingly risky as bored teenagers would go there at night and drink, have BBQs, break the old clubhouse, and smash bottles on the concrete. One morning, having had enough, I took a few black bin bags and spent the day scouring the field for all the rubbish I could find. I left the bags, conscientiously I thought, in a pile by the bin, thinking it would be collected. More fool me, because I had to spend the following day collecting the same rubbish in fresh bags.
Sure, poorly funded services play a part in all of this, as do lazy workers who like to play the jobsworth and the sheer lack of frequent bins (seriously, the 20 minute walk from my house to the campus had no bins. I checked). But attitude goes a long way in this issue, too. Watching someone casually drop their finished crisp packet or carefully put their empty can of beer on a wall is uncomfortable, for two reasons: one, it’s rude and disrespectful; two, it makes you wonder why you bother. The tragedy of the commons is a real thing, and its effects are always felt.
How did it get this bad? The current strike is one particular example of a series of complete public management failures that stretch back over ten years, which began in 2012. Lara Brown showed the absurdity of the Equality Act’s role in this debacle, with a suit brought by office-based workers against the city for “discriminatory pay practices” because the bin men and similar jobs were being paid bonuses for their work in poor conditions and at unsocial hours, resulting in the city being forced to pay the office workers more, and cap the pay of the bin men. Not only this, but the city was forced to back-date some of the payments. Collectively it cost £1.1bn.
Two factors combined to make the suit a success: one, the fact that the office workers and bin men were classified as being in the same “pay band”; and two, the fact that the office workers were primarily women, and the bin men were primarily men. Inevitably, the suit went in favour of the women. This is one of the “hard” factors contributing to the current crisis, and the inability to pay better for harder work.
This expansion in bureaucracy was one part of a toxic mix, another being continued austerity
But longer term trends have contributed to this gradual-then-sudden breakdown in an essential service. Despite their stated opposition to devolution, the newly-(re)elected Conservative Party in 2015 announced the creation of several devolved local governments, one of which was to be based in Birmingham. The West Midlands Combined Authority, which covered eighteen authorities including Birmingham, was created in 2016 to “move powers from Whitehall to the West Midlands” with a new mayor, to be elected the following year.
This expansion in bureaucracy was one part of a toxic mix, another being continued austerity. Economists have argued for nearly 20 years about the wisdom behind Britain’s economic response to the financial crisis of 2008, and I can’t add to that debate, but in Birmingham’s specific instance the prolonged cuts alongside an increase in civil servants created the conditions for what then-chief Mark Rogers predicted would be “catastrophic consequences”.
But the funding cuts that Rogers identified as £650m between 2010 and 2016 amounts to just over half of the payout for the equal pay dispute, so the reduction in funding for a council already facing a serious budget deficit can’t be blamed entirely on Westminster.
Nevertheless, the year I moved to Birmingham, the required cuts to public services in order to service the enormous deficit involved £102m, of which over £6m ended up being to waste services. Small changes — no longer providing free waste disposal bags to households, a delayed roll-out of wheelie bins, a reduction in street-cleaning — mounted on top of an already large problem of a lax attitude to waste disposal. So much so that, later that year, the BBC reported on piles of bags being left uncollected, sometimes for weeks. History is known to rhyme.
Then, in 2017, at the end of my undergraduate degree course, Birmingham waste collectors went on strike. This was worse than the current crisis, lasting nearly two months, and disrupting the entire summer. I remember stepping over ripped-open bags on the way to my summer job at the university, more than usual, and worrying if it would still be there for my degree congregations (it was).
By now though, you would not be surprised to hear that it was only an exaggeration of an existing problem. The rubbish going uncollected was only really a noticeable problem in the “nicer” parts of the city — in the poorer parts, it was a perennial issue. This was mercifully addressed by Shayk Asrar Rashid, calling on his fellow Birmingham citizens, and especially Muslim members of the city, to be more clean in their own habits and environment. He has not excused the authorities, but he does say what many of us in the city would admit: that our problems are of our own making.
At least in 2025 the army has been called in. I don’t think this was ever discussed in 2017, and while you can bemoan the cause, I think the response is commendable.
The strikes, in 2017 and 2025, are systemic failures of a city incapable of managing its own official waste disposal, but it runs concurrent with a cultural failure of the citizens towards their own city. I distinctly remember in 2021, shortly after the eco-friendly Voi scooters were introduced, seeing one disposed of neatly in a park’s pond. There’s something poignant about seeing a vehicle designed to save the environment in such a setting.
Before this, however, there were a series of bureaucratic changes to the relationship between citizens and their own capacity to get rid of their waste — principally around refuse sites, or Household Recycling Centres (HRCs). What we commoners call “tips”. During the covid pandemic, when residents were locked into their homes, the collection of refuse became a flashpoint of local frustration. New rules were introduced, including residents being required to “double-bag”, a suspension on bulk collection and garden waste collection sign-ups, and — crucially — a booking system for tips.
Introduced in June 2020, in response to citizens wanting to take control of their own waste disposal, Birmingham City introduced a new booking system designed to alleviate “additional pressure” on tips, with wait times ballooning to two hours. At the time, bookings could be made up to seven days in advance. Though the pandemic is now in the past, the booking system stays with us, and residents can in fact only book up to three days in advance. Nothing so permanent as a temporary government measure.
Moreover, the booking system was tied to the internet (advising those without internet access to “ask friends or family to help arrange bookings for them”) as well as residency. Perfectly reasonable, but with the constant churn of temporary residents in places like Selly Oak and the likelihood of unregistered peoples living in precarious housing, it became and remains very difficult for such individuals to take control of their own waste disposal.
Birmingham is facing a reckoning of its own making
Yet the strikes in 2025 are not a new development. In a form of quasi-privatisation, Veolia has managed Birmingham’s waste disposal since 1993, so a 30-year trend has finally led to its inevitable, smelly conclusion: the city is unable to manage its own affairs, as pay disputes between Veolia and staff are unable to be reconciled outside of the strictures imposed by the Equality Act and the 2012 ruling. Veolia’s contract expired in 2019, during which time the city awarded a five-year “interim” extension, to be reviewed in January 2024. It was extended.
Now, pay disputes and threats of site closures have reared their ugly head again, but for a city bankrupted by the toxic mix of an expanded bureaucracy designed to reduce dependency on Whitehall, a legal case drawn from a law imposed by Westminster, years of austerity ripping away the capacity for a city to expand its own infrastructure, semi-privatisation preventing a rapid and coherent response, and the seeming utter indifference of residents to the cleanliness of their own city, the problem will not be solved by addressing the strike alone. Birmingham is facing a reckoning of its own making. It’s just not Labour’s alone.
