If you’re in Birmingham, how bad is the bin collection situation?

[Eastie77Returns]

Is the strike impacting the whole city? Asking as I’m attending a 2 day work conference there next week and was a bit disturbed listening to a pest control company owner on the news describing how he is catching rats as big as kittens. I have a mouse/rat phobia so want to know if I need to look out for rodents the moment I step off the train?!😅

I’m assuming your conference would be in the city centre OP? I travel into the city centre every 2 weeks (mostly WFH) and the centre is fine mostly. Also had our general waste collected today, so no tip run for me this week 😁

Well I read the council are confident they can clear the entire backlog by the weekend so it should be pristine by the time you get there!

I was there on Sunday and saw Bin Lorries collecting household rubbish.

It's not called Birmingham anymore. Our rat overlords have renamed it Rattingham and all citizens must make daily offerings to Baron von Raton.

(Not really. The city centre is fine.)

Yes, city centre. Ok good to know!

Vastly exaggerated my the media.

Most areas are clear.
Very few areas are like the isolated things they are showing on the news.
There ARE people taking advantage of the situation and fly tipping all sorts of stuff the binmen wouldn't have ever taken anyway.
We aren't getting recycling collections, but you can mix in with household waste.
Virtually everyone has had their waste taken over the last fortnight. If you haven't, you are an isolated road and I feel very sorry for you. The street cleaning teams are working hard to clear up the mess left by the minority who have no respect for anyone else.

The City Centre is ok.

I went through a part with no rubbish collection last week and it is pretty bad. People have done their best so you can see the wheelie bins with bags piled sky high then the grass on the street corners has huge piles of bin bags.

Not much has escaped the bags.

I saw a news item where a woman had black bins piled up so high outside her ground floor flat they were obscuring her kitchen window. When she opened the communal building door, the bins fell in.

MIL lives in Birmingham & her area certainly had lots of overflowing bins along the street the other day.

That said, the areas the news are showing tend to be densely populated streets of terraced houses which are obviously going to look worse.

We live in a nearby area and our council have sent lorries to help.

@CarpetKnees Not sure how you know that virtually everyone has had their bins emptied over the past fortnight because that isn't true. Six weeks and counting here but you might not know it as most of us book a slot at the tip and don't fly tip.

The collections have been random until recently but now are targeting the worst affected areas. It's really shone a light on some people's behaviour, that's for sure.

It's been vastly exaggerated. There are no piles of rubbish in the city centre so no need to worry about that. My rubbish was actually collected today for the first time in six weeks, so I'm hoping that means more regular collections are incoming!

It's fine I'm there now. Nothing to see here don't believe what you're seeing in the ridiculous UK press

Can I ask how often is normal rubbish normally collected? We are three-weekly where I live and wouldn't have a "mountain" of bags after 6 weeks - just a bin full. The piles on the news seem crazy to me.

My granddaughter lives in the affected area as does a close friend.Everyone is sorting their own refuse,there is none on the street.

It is the areas where the scutters live who have rubbish all down the road,utterly disgusting.

I thought you live in Spain!

I do.... But strangely we have flights and everything from there. It's quite modern and occasionally it nice to visit my friends and family...

The city is fine grossly being exaggerated by people and the media.
travel there for work it’s same as usual.

Birmingham council is bankrupt because there are now so many residents not working and not able to be pushed into work because they can't speak English etc etc, so there's no one to pay for the services essentially. Kind of learn a lesson the hard way, but really not sure what the future golds for that city now.

Have a couple of friends who live there. The media are focussing on areas with piles of rubbish, are those are areas which normally have piles of fly tipping and excess waste everywhere. Plus HMOs (Houses of Multiple Occupancy) where the landlords are too tight to pay a one off charge for an extra bin. Yet happily take £800 pcm per resident.

It's primarily because of a very large equal pay claim settlement, but don't let the facts get in the way of your racist rant, eh?

Wow.
How to say you know nothing about it, without actually saying 'I know nothing about it'.

The racism in this post says a lot about you.

I live in south west Birmingham, it’s not too bad here at all, we had one week where our bins weren’t collected, but they’ve been collected every other week since the strikes began. I think some people are taking advantage and fly tipping outside flats, as for some reason they have rubbish strewn everywhere including furniture.

Should be weekly for non recyclable rubbish and fortnightly for recycling and garden waste ( paid for). This is about to change ie when no strikes, to fortnightly for household rubbish and weekly food waste. Recycling isn't happening atm and it's all going in together.
There are many large households, HMO, non standard dwellings etc in B'ham producing above average waste, so even fortnightly is going to be a challenge.
The piles on the news are not necessarily from properties in the immediate area; mindless fly tipping is a growing pastime in places.

Yes, my understanding was that it was largely the equal pay claim. It was for an obscene amount.

Tbf, I'm a little on the fence about the whole equal pay decision. I wholeheartedly support equality, but the issue wasn't men getting paid more for the same work (e.g. male vs female cleaners). It was a ruling about 'work of equal value'.

It seems it essentially started with cleaners arguing that they should be paid the same as refuse workers. However, the jobs aren't really comparable IMO - I say that after having worked for three years at the UK's second largest waste contractor and having also spent 4.5 working for a 'top 3' cleaning/security provider.

Refuse collection is the second most dangerous job in the UK. They have a high incidence of being assaulted by angry members of the public, being hit by impatient cars that mount the kerb to drive past (often hitting the refuse collectors as they pull the bins out from behind the truck), and they regularly encounter used syringes/dogs and all manner of things that you're much less likely to find in a typical office/workplace environment.

And many get up at 03:30am to work in the pouring rain and freezing temps. It's really not a comparable job IMHO and it almost feels like the decision may have been pandering to public opinion or the simplified view that 'they're both concerned with removing waste'.

I'd like to think that they did a robust comparison but I don't have much faith in governmental bodies nowadays I'm afraid!

https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/most-dangerous-jobs

I haven't read the full judgment (clearly you haven't either) but the court found after lengthy proceedings that it was work of equal value.

I don't think the current citizens of Birmingham should be made to pay the price, but that doesn't mean the courts got it wrong. IMO central government should have stepped in to meet the costs of compensation rather than it coming from urrent and future council taxpayers but that will never happen!

(And the courts are not governmental bodies. We have separation of powers in this country between executive, legislature and judiciary).

Eta quote fail - that was replying to @LastRoIo

I wonder if the refuse collectors thought initially their industrial action would last this long. That's over a month without pay and a massive impact on their pensions.