Birmingham, UK
CNN
—
Will Timms is a very busy man. The pest controller spends his days criss-crossing Britain’s second-largest city to remove rats, cockroaches and other unwanted creatures from people’s homes.
Lately, Timms’ phone has barely stopped ringing as some 17,000 metric tons of garbage have piled up on Birmingham’s streets.
“The smell is absolutely unbelievable,” Timms told CNN. “You’ve got rotting food, you’ve got maggots on the floor crawling out of the bags.”
Birmingham’s garbage collectors have been on strike over pay, so some of the city’s 1.2 million residents have not had their waste collected for weeks. Mounds of garbage bags, some several feet high, dot the red-brick streets like pins on a corkboard. In the Balsall Heath neighborhood, wind whistles through the puncture marks in one rotting heap where the rats and mice have burrowed in.
“That’s a five-star restaurant for them and they’ve got a hotel to go with it,” said Timms.
Business is booming — so much so that Timms, who works alone, cannot handle the caseload and has passed some jobs to rival pest controllers. He said the number of calls from people finding rats in their homes has shot up around 50% since the garbage workers’ strikes started.
It’s a Dickensian portrait of a city in the world’s sixth-biggest economy — a city that once propelled Britain’s wealth-creating industrial revolution yet, less than two years ago, declared itself essentially bankrupt.
“There’s rubbish everywhere, rats everywhere … (they’re) bigger than cats,” Abid, one passer-by in Balsall Heath, told CNN. “This is Britain. This is 2025. What’s going on?”
The answer: Nearly 400 garbage collectors are striking over the city government’s decision to eliminate a particular role within their ranks. Unite, the union representing the workers, argues that the move blocks workers’ pay progression and demotes some staff, resulting in an annual salary cut of up to £8,000 ($10,390) in the worst cases.
Birmingham City Council disputes that figure and says it has offered alternative roles and retraining opportunities to affected workers. On its website, the council states that “no worker need lose any money” and that the staffing changes are crucial part of its attempt to “become financially sustainable” and modernize its waste collection service.
The bitter dispute recently tipped into its fourth consecutive month and has escalated. At first the strikes were intermittent, but in early March they turned indefinite. Only some of the city’s garbage collectors and agency staff are still working, and according to the council, fewer than half the usual number of garbage trucks are currently operational.
Some parts of the city appeared to be much more affected than others when CNN visited last week.
On Monday, the city council declared that the buildup of waste and the public health risk it poses had created a “major incident” — an official mechanism that allowed officials to deploy extra garbage trucks around the city. The council said that protesters have blocked trucks leaving waste depots, resulting in fewer collections from households.
“It is a dangerous job, it’s a dirty job, it’s an extremely physically demanding job … so people deserve to be properly rewarded for it,” Onay Kasab, national lead officer at Unite, told CNN.
The BBC series “Peaky Blinders,” about a crime gang set in 1920s Birmingham, put the city on the global map when it premiered over a decade ago — spawning its own tourism industry and bringing the city some sorely needed cachet.
But Birmingham is struggling.
In late 2023, the Birmingham City Council, run by Britain’s ruling Labour Party, filed a section 114 notice — the local government version of bankruptcy — which halted all spending excluding that on essential services such as education and waste collection.
It went bust in large part because an equal pay dispute stretching back many years means it must pay out huge sums in compensation to former workers — most of them women who were paid less than men for similar work.
But the council’s mistakes have added to pressures beyond its control.
Demand for its services has risen as Brummies — the name for the city’s residents — live longer, while the costs of delivering those services have risen, too. It’s a predicament shared by local governments across the country, with many teetering on a financial knife edge.
Britain’s local authorities receive a big chunk of their funding in the form of grants from the central government. But the value of these grants has plummeted since 2010, when the former Conservative government embarked on a decade of austerity designed to shrink the country’s debts following the financial crisis.
In England, councils’ funding per resident — including both grants and local taxes — is 18% below its level in 2010 on average, according to a report in June 2024 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Birmingham’s misfortunes weigh heavy on Timms, the pest controller. “I am fuming (about) the way the city is looking,” he said of the recent garbage crisis. “It’s affecting everybody’s health.”
Still, the onslaught of negative news bothers the lifelong Brummy because it obscures the full truth of his hometown.
“Brummies, there seems to be like a solidarity (between us), and it’s fantastic,” he said. “I love Birmingham to bits.”
