Birmingham bin dispute: Hundreds of bins uncollected per day

Up to 900 missed bin collections from Birmingham's streets are reported every day, an email to city councillors has revealed.

Labour council cabinet member John O'Shea admitted there was a "very serious problem" and said the authority was seeking to "iron out" issues.

He blamed a change in workers' shift patterns from a four-day week to the same number of hours over five days.

Residents said uncollected rubbish was attracting rats.

The issues have emerged two months after the end of strikes by workers over "secret payments" made to those who did not take part in a dispute in 2017.

In an email to fellow councillors, Mr O'Shea said there were between 600 and 900 reported missed collections every day.

"We have a number of issues with the new round structure," Mr O'Shea told the BBC.

"Some of that is the crews getting used to the new rounds and some of it is about ironing out the problems where the new rounds don't quite work.

"We need to do better. We need to revise what we deal with recycling once we have it and how we improve it."

Mike Goulding, 69, said despite emailing the council every day, his recycling was not collected for five weeks.

Before it was picked up on Wednesday morning, Mr Goulding, who is disabled, said he was so frustrated he considered taking his wheelie bin to the Council House.

Zaheer Akbar, from Alum Rock Community Forum, said he had reported four missed collections.

Neil Eustace, Liberal Democrat councillor for Yardley East, said the situation was "shambolic" and people were "totally fed up".

"Many people are now just putting recycling in with the regular rubbish because they see it as a pointless effort with the council is not playing its part," he said.

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