Robert Alden: Our plan to end the Birmingham bin strike

‘Rats as big as cats’ as ‘cat sized rats are attacking our cars’ in the city where Labour’s bin strike ‘offers ‘banquet’ for rats, pest expert says’. Business may be booming for the pest control companies of the West Midlands but for residents, Labour are delivering a horrendous 2025.

From the City of a thousand trades to the city of a thousand rats (well a lot more!), the last three months have seen the Labour administration at Birmingham City Council enter their third bin strike in the last eight years. The impact of the internal dispute between different wings of the Labour movement has, in only a few weeks, been devastating on the city.

Birmingham was suffering from one of the worst bin services in the country even before this latest strike started. In Birmingham, the Council only publish actual reported missed collections, not as is the industry standard, all known missed collections. For example, you report your road has not had its bins collected; instead of recording that as the number of properties on the street, they record it as one missed collection. At the time of the first bin strike in 2017, reported missed collections in Birmingham ran at 73 per 100,000. As of December, before this latest strike even began, they are running at 356 per a 100,000.

For context, the City Council Director for City Operations recently told the press that best best-performing Councils have a rate of four per 100,000 and the worst are 100 per 100,000. Birmingham’s after 13 years of Labour is running 3.5 times higher than the worst – before the most recent strikes even began.

While up to December 2024 (again pre-strike); one in four incidents of dumped waste in the city did not even get cleared within seven days. With a 25% increase on fly-tipped waste before the strike began, it is easy to see why the city is in such a mess.

Brummies and visitors to Birmingham now face rubbish at every turn. Whether it is uncollected rubbish or fly-tipped waste. The city with a self-declared failed refuse service is sitting in the middle of a five-day-a-week strike, with no end in sight.

In the first three months of the strike the administration has suspended recycling collections, taken payments from residents for the garden waste collection service only to then scrap that service, and halted bulky waste collections. Currently, the Council is simply trying to collect the residual waste. The fact that this is all the Council can currently, barely, manage to do is important.

To make matters worse, the Labour Administration at the City Council is still currently planning to plough ahead with a roll out of a city-wide change to the frequency and method of collecting rubbish across the city. These changes, different to the causes of the strike, will see the introduction of food waste collections via a new bin, yet to be delivered, and residual collections moving to fortnightly, with the collections routes and therefore collection day changing. It is clear that the Council, who cannot even manage to collect one bin, does not have the capacity to make these changes during a strike.

We have called on the Council to suspend this rollout until 2026 at the earliest, given the on-going strike and the need to rebuild the trust in the recycling service following months of no collections. So far the Council have refused this request.

To understand how the Labour Council found itself in this mess, one has to go back to the cause and solution to their first bin dispute back in the summer of 2017. To settle this strike the Council gave up trying to scrap the ‘leading hands’ role and instead renamed them WRCO officers as part of a deal, with additional duties bolted on that it has been alleged resulted in grade inflation.

The local paper has highlighted since then, on several occasions, that these roles are the cause of Labour’s Equal Pay crisis that helped effectively bankrupt the Council.

This was followed by a further strike that started in 2018. At the time the BBC reported Unite claiming“members in the city have been denied a council payment made to GMB members who did not walk out in the long-running dispute last year”. This was only ended when eventually the Council made a series of further payments in 2019.

Birmingham Labour have sadly repeatedly ignored Equal Pay warnings over the last six years including:

The Birmingham Mail has reported that the Labour Council were given reports “which starkly warns of potential equal pay doom as a result. Reports from officers highlighted the risks” back in November 2017 when they considered solutions to the 2017 bin strike.

In a 2022 report the Cabinet came clean that “In 2018, BCC and the Recognised Trade Unions agreed to review the seven grade pay structure – viewed as being an inequitable structure” confirming that the Council was fully aware of a inequitable pay structure as far back as 2018.

In the 2019 Audit of Accounts the City Council were recommended to “commission a review of the new working practices in place within the refuse service to ensure that they are embedded and monitored robustly to minimise the potential for further Equal Pay claims”.

In 2020 the Labour cabinet was warned “Equal pay continues to present a challenge for the Council”.

The Council was told that trade unions such as GMB had told their members not to sign settlement agreements “after significant new information emerged surrounding problems with the council’s job evaluation scheme”.

In 2022 the Labour Cabinet even agreed to spend £3.5m to “achieve the modelling of a new fit-for-purpose NJC for LGS pay structure”. Warned in that report that to do nothing would leave a “continued risk of potential Equal Pay claims”.

The ruling administration has built a huge credibility gap between the words they say and the reality in the city. The BBC reported “The leader of Birmingham City Council said he was surprised when it was revealed the authority faces a bill of up to £760m for equal pay claims. John Cotton took over in May and said the commitment came to light when he ordered a review of the finances”.

Yet within months, the Birmingham Mail was reporting that the previous February “current leader John Cotton was in an ‘inner circle’ of people who were advised at a meeting that the equal pay ‘exposure’ facing the council was estimated at ‘between £300m and £800m’”. 

That same article highlights “Senior Labour politicians in Birmingham ‘knew in early February’ that the city was facing a potential equal pay liability of up to £800 million. They went on to set a budget for the year ahead that gave the issue a ‘zero’ risk rating”. While Council reports highlighted equal pay issues for years before that.

In reality, the Council Political leadership had been warned about the risk of equal pay by auditors, officers, trade unions and the opposition. And the Labour Leadership chose to ignore those warnings.

They even had members of the administration tweeting that they supported GMB’s fight for Equal Pay in Birmingham, yet apparently it never crossed their minds to firstly look at the cost of not paying people equally to the Council, nor bothering to actually fix the issue!

This ignoring of warnings from a spectrum of people over the last 8 years is why the Council is left now facing a strike in response to finally trying to end an equal pay liability, the press claim the administration themselves created back in 2017.

The failure to stand up for women and taxpayers and abolish the equal pay risk, despite all the warnings, is why the Labour Council are now left with a third bin strike.

Wherever you turn, print media, social media, tv or radio the City of Birmingham’s reputation is being dragged through the mud and doing untold damage. Residents are being subjected to living amongst rubbish and rats that are out of control. Birmingham and Brummies deserve so much better than they are getting from this current Labour administration which has run out of ideas and run out of credibility.

That’s why we have this week published our plan, as the opposition, for ending Labour’s bin strike. The Labour Council are failing to lead, but the opposition is stepping up to the plate and putting residents first by putting forward a plan to get a resolution moving.

Birmingham Local Conservatives’ plan to end the bin strike:

• Ensure the safety of staff who choose to work, enabling them to access and exit depots, including with vehicles, without facing intimidation. The City Council has an unequivocal duty of care to its employees, and this obligation must not be compromised. Take action against anyone found to have attacked staff trying to do their job.
• Expedite all necessary actions to eliminate the council’s equal pay liability without further delay, including permanently ceasing any roles risking continued liability. Deliver on the Council’s prior commitment to resolve all liabilities by 31 March 2025, therefore any required formal notices to amend roles or terms and conditions should be issued promptly, in full compliance with legal consultation requirements. Under no circumstances should the Council settle the bin dispute in a way that creates further equal pay risks.
• Attach a clear and reasonable deadline to any offer presented to the unions. If the offer is lawful and avoids creating new equal pay liabilities, it should be reissued with a specified expiration date. If the unions do not accept by this date, the offer should be withdrawn, to prevent taxpayers being held to ransom.
• Urgently complete the previously committed review of the service’s future operating model. As promised by the Administration, this review must assess all options, including externalisation, to determine the model delivering the best value for residents based on a comprehensive evaluation.
• Explore the redeployment of council employees on flexible contracts to support city cleanup efforts during the dispute. Where staff in non-safety-critical roles can assist, they should be utilised to the fullest extent permitted by law and their contractual terms.
• Implement in full the Local Conservatives’ fully costed ‘Plan for a Cleaner City’; including maintaining weekly collections, scrapping the ‘Rat Tax’ and increasing street cleaning, as proposed at the March budget meeting.

We urge Labour to reconsider their earlier opposition and adopt this plan to address the city’s immediate and future needs.