Rubbish strike in Birmingham passes 14 months

Mark O'Neill June 11, 2026 20:59

Birmingham was a crucible of Europe’s industrial revolution, inventing the steam engine and electroplating and producing the guns, motor vehicles and railway carriages that powered the British Empire.

But, since March 11 last year, no city workers have collected the refuse of its 1.2 million people. They have seen the streets full of rotting waste, broken glass, swarms of rats and the constant threat of disease. In some streets, the rubbish has reached several feet high, with foxes and seagulls tearing open plastic bags.

“Since March 2025, Birmingham has endured an almost unimaginable breakdown in basic municipal services,” wrote William Yarwood, one exasperated resident, on a blog on March 11 this year. “What started as an industrial dispute has now become a full-blown civic disgrace. Streets that were once busy neighbourhoods have become dumping grounds.

“No major city in a developed country should ever be left to turn into an open-air rubbish dump,” he said. Birmingham is Britain’s second largest city, after London.

Is this a developed country, one of the G7 nations?

Last month the citizens elected a new city council. On June 5, the new members elected their leader, deputy leader and members of the cabinet.

The new leader, Roger Harmer, a Liberal Democrat, said: “the bin strike has gone unresolved for far too long, impacting the daily lives of thousands. Tackling this head-on is not optional, it is essential.” He and his colleagues promised to try to solve a problem their predecessors could not fix for 14 months.

The crisis has its origins in an equal pay case in 2012. A group of former city council employees brought a case against the Council. They said that female workers, like cooks and cleaners, had been paid less than their male colleagues in comparable jobs.

The courts found in their favour. This brought an avalanche of claims by current and former council employees. The Council had to pay 1.1 billion pounds in compensation for equal pay claims, with further liabilities estimated at 760 million pounds.

In September 2023, unable to balance its books, the city declared bankruptcy. It had to make swingeing cuts and offer equal pay to avoid further legal claims. This meant significant pay cuts for many refuse workers.

They started their strike in March 2025.

To replace them, the city council employed temporary agency workers to collect the rubbish. This did not go smoothly. Some complained of an unsustainable workload, bullying and threats of being blacklisted from permanent council jobs if they refused to cross picket lines.

Unite, the trade union of the strikers, organised pickets and protests to try to prevent the agency staff from working.

In May last year, Birmingham’s High Court issued an injunction to stop the strikers from delaying bin lorries from leaving or entering depots in the city. They said that no more than six people could picket.

Last December about 40 agency workers joined the strike. One, Luke Graham, said: “there was no support or gratitude for keeping the service running. We kept it going, working overtime and doing extra work. There were constant threats on our job. I think all the agency lads now have had enough and just want to come out and stand for what’s right.”

Birmingham is not alone. Many towns in England have had to cut or reduce their municipal rubbish collection because of government funding costs.

In Pickering, a town of 7,000 in North Yorkshire, the local government does not provide this service. Local residents, working for nothing, collect rubbish, sweep the streets and maintain the local gardens.

A local government official said that it had a limited budget. “We have to give priority to social care, such as looking after the old and handicapped. There is no budget for refuse collection,” she said.

Nationwide, nearly a quarter of councils in English have delayed mandatory weekly collections of food waste because they lacked the money to buy the vehicles to collect them and for day-to-day operations.

During the 19th century, Birmingham was known as the “Workshop of the World”. Most important was the metal industry. It became known as the “City of a Thousand Trades" because of the wide variety of goods it manufactured, including buttons, cutlery, nails and screws, guns, tools, jewellery, toys, locks and ornaments.

But today it cannot collect its rubbish.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.