The ongoing strike action in Birmingham over the last few weeks has seen many areas of the city blighted by piles of black bin bags being left on pavements and verges, many of which then attract all sorts of other fly-tipping, with old furniture, mattresses, fridges etc all being added to the pile.
The BBC today published an article which ‘exposes the divide between rich and poor’, and makes some claims which I think need to be rightly questioned.
In parts of Birmingham waste continues to go uncollected as all-out strike action by bin workers grinds on into its sixth week, leaving some of the city’s 1.2 million residents to deal with the fallout.
The UK’s second city is the largest local authority area in the country, with more than 400,000 households within its boundaries. But they have not been affected equally by the industrial action, and as more time has passed a contrast has begun to emerge.
The dispute has seen waste pile up in some areas, with the problem most stark in the densely populated inner-city areas. Wealthier, more sparsely populated parts have experienced fewer problems.
On the same day that the streets of Balsall Heath were being overwhelmed with rubbish, so much that it was hard in places to walk down the street, a few miles away in wealthy Harborne, wheelie bins stood neatly waiting for collection with no sign of any additional waste.
“Bin strike exposes divide between rich and poor” – BBC News, 19th April 2025
Let me start by saying that due to the strike action being undertaken by members of the Unite union, the available workforce has been reduced, which means the number of refuse trucks that can go out each day is fewer than normal. With recycling collections suspended, the focus is on getting as many household wheelie bins emptied as is possible.
The BBC social justice warriors are – in a nutshell – claiming that ‘wealthy’ parts of the city are being prioritised over the ‘deprived’ parts, which are mainly populated by ethnic-minorities.
This time it already seemed worse than the last strike in Birmingham in 2017, and like then, it appeared to highlight the disparity of wealth in Britain’s second city.
The poorer the area, the worse the smell and the bigger the mess.
The effects of the strike have been most visible in the city’s most deprived wards and places like Small Heath, Sparkbrook and Ladywood.
Here the streets of Victorian terraced houses are home to large multi-generational families or have been divided into flats.
The population density is highest in this area, so there is more waste, and fewer people have access to cars to take their rubbish to the tips. These are the areas where the biggest piles of rubbish have grown.
Yes, it is true that those named areas have a high population density, so there will be more waste generated. I have the misfortune of having to work in Sparkbrook, so I know first-hand what it is like there.
On the other hand, I live out in the leafy suburbs of Birmingham, not far from ‘wealthy’ Moseley, and we’ve had piles of bin bags at times. I wouldn’t say our collections have been reliable, and I don’t think we are being prioritised somehow.
Maybe it’s because I’m a single person living by myself, but quite frankly I am amazed by how much rubbish is generated by supposedly ‘poor’ people – you’d think they wouldn’t have money to buy lots of things with packaging to be disposed of, and you’d also think that ‘deprived’ folk wouldn’t have a lot of food waste to throw out either!
I keep reading about the levels of deprivation in areas such as Small Heath, Sparkbrook and Sparkhill, as well as my local suburb of Billesley. But yet despite this, you can walk around any such area for yourself, and you’re guaranteed to see home extension works, modern and flashy cars, as well as people wearing designer clothing and walking around with the latest iPhones etc.
The other issue which conveniently gets overlooked at times is that of ‘fly-tipping’, which has been going on for years through-out Birmingham.
I first met Naz Khan during the last bin strike when he and his friends hired a lorry to collect rubbish from people who could not take it away themselves.
Eight years later I bumped into him again, once again trying to help people get rid of their rubbish.
He told me that the problems in his area had been exacerbated by people from elsewhere bringing their rubbish into poorer inner-city areas to get rid of it.
“A lot of people are using our areas to do a lot of fly-tipping”, he said, adding that he felt there was a “postcode issue” when it came to bin collections.
In one of the biggest piles of waste I saw there was an old bed frame, several empty tins of catering cooking oil and even the front bumper from a Toyota.
I have seen such piles even in my local leafy neighbourhood, and you know instantly that this isn’t people leaving out ‘household waste’, this is opportunistic fly-tipping.
Birmingham has five household recycling centres where residents are able to take their rubbish and dispose of it responsibly, in Castle Bromwich, Kings Norton, Perry Barr, Sutton Coldfield and Tyseley. While it is true that you have to book a slot in advance for your visit – you can’t just turn up whenever you feel like it – this has always been an option for the vast number of people who have access to a car or van, and best of all the service is free! (Provided you are a council-tax paying resident of Birmingham of course!)
I go back to the earlier claim about “fewer people having access to cars” in the ‘deprived’ inner-city areas, and I politely disagree. One of the problems with transport through those areas is due to car parking issues, which means there are plenty of households and individuals who own cars, as well as vans.
And in these ‘deprived’ areas of Birmingham, with their ethnic-minority populations, you often hear of praise for the ‘community spirit’. Which mysteriously vanishes when there’s an opportunity for these communities to actually help each other – you know your neighbour three doors down, Mr Khan, he has a nice big Mercedes Sprinter van, wouldn’t it be great if he organised to take some of his neighbours rubbish over to Tyseley to dispose of it? (To the recycling centre of course, not just dump it on some side street)
But sadly there are also opportunists, those who will take money from you in desperation to get rid of your waste, only to then drive around the block and dump on a roadside somewhere.
Fly-tipping in Birmingham has been a big concern for many years, even before the current strike action, and most notably in the inner-city areas that have been highlighted by the BBC and other local media outlets. And I can’t help but wonder if ‘certain people’ are being encouraged to do this, in the knowledge that it only takes a couple of reports of fly-tipping for it to be cleared up by the council ‘for free’, though obviously ultimately at the cost of local council tax-payers.
(Of course, if you either choose not to pay council-tax, or find a way to make yourself exempt from payment then this does not directly affect you!)
One evening in Balsall Heath, I spoke to a resident who told me that the problems had been exacerbated by a lack of civic pride from locals, but blamed the poor waste collection service their area had experienced even before industrial action began for creating a sense of malaise.
It is a common complaint, that waste collections are missed here and not in wealthy Edgbaston.
You often hear the unsubstantiated claim that streets where councillors live are always spick-and-span, but the ones nearby are left to fend for themselves.
People repeatedly have told me they believe there is a two-tier waste collection in operation.
I for one don’t believe there is a “two-tier waste collection” and I think such claims are definitely unsubstantiated, and there is a sense and a perception of this which is a classic ‘divide-and-rule’ technique.
At the end of the day, these refuse trucks go out on their rounds, and they are limited as to the amount of rubbish and waste they can collect.
Maybe the ‘wealthy’ residents of Edgbaston and Harborne don’t leave out as much waste as the ‘deprived’ people of Balsall Heath, Sparkbrook and Ladywood do?
And are these ‘deprived’ areas really as poor as they are made out to be?
