There’s been a lot of trash talk about Birmingham recently. Most obviously, a strike by the city council’s refuse workers, now in its fifth week, has filled the streets with sweaty black bin liners. The accumulated rubbish has now reached thousands of tonnes. But on a more symbolic level, it is all too easy to see this crisis and its obvious historical resonances – the 1970s, managed decline – as just another chapter in the story of a retreating Birmingham, often cast as Britain’s forgotten second city.
Even within the city, the crisis isn’t the same for everyone, stratified along social lines. As I walked around the city centre early on a warm and bright Wednesday morning, there were few signs of disorder. Towards the top of the New Street strip of boutiques and coffee shops, a single translucent bin bag was being inspected by a yellow-beaked gull. The city council’s headquarters, a grand grade II-listed building constructed during the Victorian era, loomed in the background. By the lunchtime rush, even this modest pile of mess had disappeared. “That’s because the city centre has cleaners specifically focused on it,” someone familiar with the city’s local politics claimed to me. “A lot of the rubbish build-up will still be in the less affluent areas.”
Vishal, an Uber driver who took me to the east of the city, told me the strike has “been a nightmare”. He raised his hand towards the front windscreen: “It’s terrible. [The] weather’s nice, it’s sunny, but [the rubbish] is ripe, it smells. I can’t even open the car windows. If I’m picking up somebody near a heap of bins, that smells. When the next customer comes in, he’s going to be pissed off at me.” As a result of the strikes, Vishal and his neighbours have been putting their rubbish in their back gardens, where it has stayed for weeks. “I saw a massive rat in my garden – it made a hole in the fence… Luckily, my neighbour has a cat.”
For those with bigger families, or without a space at the back of their property, rubbish is often perched outside front doors. As we passed through the residences in the Bordesley Green and Small Heath suburbs, clusters of bin bags, food waste and even a sofa lined the streets by the nearby primary school. The suspension of the collection of recycling and food waste by the council has caused particular outrage. “People are pissed off,” Vishal added, “but the majority [of] people are pissed off at the council because they’ve been rubbish. This has been in the making for years – so badly mismanaged for years and years.”
The immediate cause of the strikes is a supposed attempt to make this service fit for the future. Birmingham City Council is planning to eradicate the roles of Waste Recycling and Collection Officers (WRCO), as part of its plans to create “a modern, sustainable and consistently reliable” bin service for its residents, who were hit by a 10 per cent increase in council tax last year and a 7.5 per cent rise earlier this month. The hikes follow the council issuing a section 114 notice in 2023 – essentially declaring bankruptcy – triggered by the settlement of an equal pay claim that dates back more than a decade. To help balance the books, the council has pencilled in £300m of spending cuts over this and last year.
If the WRCO role is axed, it is feared around 150 workers would lose around £8,000 from their salary – around a quarter of their pay. Birmingham City Council disputes these figures, claiming that some workers have accepted other roles, and that the maximum loss a worker could face is £6,000. The council also argues that the role does not exist in other local authorities, and that revoking it would help avoid another “huge future equal pay liability”. The Unite union, which largely represents the council’s workers, has been in dispute with the authority since last summer; the strike action began in January. Talks between the two parties over a solution are ongoing but remain fractious: on Thursday (10 April) the BBC reported that Unite’s national leadership had been responsible for scuppering a potential resolution.
Vishal had picked me up from a council-run processing centre based in an industrial estate in the south-east of the city. Empty metal barricades by the site’s entrance, manned by the striking workers earlier in the morning, gleamed in the sun. “They were walking in front of the trucks and stopping them,” a local metalworker told me. “That became [effectively] illegal as of [last] weekend,” he added, referring to increased police presence – following the council declaring “major incident” protocols – in the area monitoring any potential breach of the peace offences. With the council-employed strikers gone by the afternoon, the agency workers the local authority regularly contract (at higher hourly rates than their counterparts) could pass in and out of the facility freely. But the surrounding area was tidy – bar a single, overflowing bin.
As promised, it’s a different story in the rest of the city. At a four-way mini-roundabout in Alum Rock, all roads lead to mounds of rubbish: outside a fried chicken shop, topped by a dripping container of oil; past the local car wash; outside a corner shop; and in a smaller cluster going towards residential properties. How long had it been there? “Dunno,” a man, looking in his early twenties, told me swiftly after adding another black bag to the pile outside the chicken shop.
His friends, sitting around the corner, told me that the rubbish hadn’t been taken for three weeks. “Shit everywhere! Shit everywhere!” one called when I asked the others if the level of cluster around was normal (perhaps a stupid question). “It’s not normal, there’s shit everywhere!” Up the road a local shopkeeper of 22 years, standing by his proud collection of fresh fruit, vegetables and south Asian spices (more than two thirds of the area’s residents come from either Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani backgrounds) told me the strikes are “way worse” than a previous one held by refuse workers in 2017. “All this isn’t very good for our health,” he said. “What can I do? This is a problem – a big, big, problem… I don’t know what I can do. We’re complaining to [the] council, but they never [listen].”
Birmingham City Council is bearing the brunt of the blame among locals, and despite the mess, there was a strong current of support for the striking refuse workers. “It’s a hard job,” one of the young men by the chicken shop told me. “Many people [would] refuse to even work this job; it’s a lot [of] responsibility; the smell… If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The council should be listening to them.” The shopkeeper, finishing his stock take, similarly had sympathy for the workers – “they can’t survive, that’s why they strike” – and contempt for the council. “This is meant to be the UK’s second city, and this situation they can’t handle. I don’t know why. What’s going on?”
Serving over 1.1 million residents, Birmingham City Council is not only the largest unitary authority in the UK by population, but all of Europe. John Cotton is the current Labour leader of the local authority; the city it serves has seen its population grow by over 15 per cent over the last 20 years. But thanks to the bankruptcy two years ago and bin strikes like this, the city has become a byword for government failure. It’s a far cry from the city’s late-Victorian and Edwardian golden age. “There was a time where Birmingham was seen as particularly effective in regards to local governance,” the author, historian and Brummie Richard Vinen told me. He pointed to an article, published in the August 1895 edition of the New York-based Harper’s magazine, which hailed Birmingham as “The best-governed city in the world.”
During this period, the city benefited from the forthright political leaders of the time. Joseph Chamberlain, the Liberal-Tory pioneer of “municipal socialism”, was one of the city’s first mayors and cleared its Victorian slums, installed public works and founded the city’s university. His mantle was taken up by his son, Neville, who long before becoming prime minister, also served as mayor. As his future opponent Winston Churchill wrote in 1937, he too was the “master of [Birmingham’s] local needs; a super-mayor attending to gas and water, to public baths and wash-houses, to very early town-planning improvement schemes”.
Today, Birmingham lacks such ambitious leadership. Instead, there is a vacuum of accountability, with no one squarely responsible for the swirl of austerity, bankruptcy and the industrial action we see today. Recent conversations with local Labour and Conservative figures simply turn through a cycle of blame: from the former Tory mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street (“It’s happening because they [the Labour-controlled council] have mismanaged their finances”); his Labour successor, Richard Parker (“Michael Gove claimed the [equal claim payout] was £1bn; the actual figure is £250m… that was a political decision by Gove, as was to send in the [government-appointed] commissioners”); to the local MP most vociferous about her constituents’ displeasure, Preet Gill (“The last Conservative government took nearly £1bn of funding out of this council since 2010”).
“Obviously,” Vinen said, referring to the city’s triumphant era, “that isn’t the case any more.” Birmingham is the city, in the view of certain factions of the media, that is the leading “metaphor for squalid national freefall”; the build-up of bin bags being the latest motif. But the bin strike in particular shows it is also at the forefront of another development: the shirking of political responsibility. Citizens don’t know who to blame or punish for their cluttered streets. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister and Local Government Secretary, has visited the city but made it clear that the responsibility to solve the strikes is on the council. “This is a local dispute, and it is right that the negotiations are led locally,” she told the Commons on Tuesday (April 8).
However, the instinct to project visions of social collapse upon Birmingham can flatten the city into a lazy caricature; of a place destined for failure. Despite the alarmist headlines (“Rats ‘the size of CATS’”; “Stinking streets”), the city is far from a site of misfortune. The mood when I visited was one of local pride, centred on the city’s two football teams (perhaps its last great local industry): Birmingham City had secured promotion to the Championship the previous day, while Aston Villa were in Paris partaking in its first European quarter-final tie for more than 40 years.
And while the strikes have exacerbated the sense of unease, it is hard to distinguish its clutter from the city’s more chronic issues. “It used to be clean,” one local told me. “Not anymore.” I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the effects of the strike – or before we collectively became used to seeing miscellaneous rubbish form part of the foliage of towns and cities across the whole country. A 40 per cent real terms cut of central government funding to councils between 2009-10 and 2019-20 cannot go unmentioned when accounting for this.
Rather than “leading” any idea of national decline, Birmingham should be seen as reflective of its symptoms: neglect, loss of civic pride, administrative cross-talk. But many of its strengths also apply to towns and cities across the country, where there is the popular will, if not the political leaders, to change things. “No matter what happens,” Vishal told me as we were about to part ways, “the people of Birmingham are resilient. They’re kind-hearted. There is solidarity between people, and they understand what [one another] go through… At the end of the day, hard times come and go, right?” He is surely right – but if Birmingham is the local victim of a national crisis, it will take a national vision worthy of the city’s Victorian forefathers to restore it.
[See also: A drinker’s guide to offshore London]
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