Opposition councillors have called for the introduction of fortnightly bin collections in Birmingham to be halted until next year as the strike takes its toll on the city.

Residents are being forced to endure huge piles of rubbish bags, overflowing bins and fears over rats as the city remains gripped by the strike.

The industrial action, which started earlier this year in January, was triggered by a dispute between the Labour-run Birmingham City Council and Unite the union over the scrapping of a certain role.

As residents and high-profile political figures express deep concern over the state of the city, Conservative councillors are now requesting that the controversial move from weekly to fortnightly bin collections be suspended until 2026.

From next month, the city council is planning for neighbourhoods across the city to transition in phases to fortnightly collections of household rubbish.

In a letter addressed to Majid Mahmood, the council’s cabinet member for environment, the Conservative councillors wrote that Brummies are already grappling with “significant disruption and uncertainty”.

“Adding a major overhaul to collection schedules will exacerbate an already untenable situation for households across the city,” the opposition shadow cabinet continued.

“For families, elderly residents, and those in flats with limited storage, managing waste is already a daily struggle.

“Introducing fortnightly collections amidst this burden would create a double whammy, forcing residents to store twice as much residual waste with no guarantee of when – or if – it will be collected.”

They went on to argue that switching to fortnightly collections mid-strike “feels like piling one uncertainty atop another”.

“We urge you to pause this plan until the industrial action is settled, the streets are cleaned and normal service resumes,” the Conservative councillors added.

“We believe that summer of 2026 is the earliest possible practical timeframe to allow the council to properly plan for this.

“Give residents a chance to adjust without the added stress of overflowing bins.”

The introduction of fortnightly collections could be delayed anyway however due to the strike.

The council’s strategic director of city operations Craig Cooper was asked on Tuesday, the day the strike went ‘all out’, whether the plans could be impacted by the strike.

“The entire service and our ability to move to improvements is being held to ransom by the industrial action,” he said. “It could be delayed.

“Our intention is to hope that it’s not delayed.”

A delay would be a setback for the crisis-hit council, which has described plans to transform waste collection as a key part of its recovery plan and a way to both significantly reduce costs and improve reliability.

As well as the move to fortnightly collections, the authority also wants to bring in a weekly food waste collection and a second recycling bin specifically for recycling paper and cardboard.

‘We have a lot of support from residents’

Addressing the bins strike on March 11, Mr Cooper also argued that Unite were causing disruption on the behalf of a “very small cohort” of workers.

He also urged the union to “be really clear about what their expectations for this strike are and what they’re aiming to achieve”.

Unite organised the strike amid council’s plans to scrap the waste recycling and collection officer role, which the union described as “safety-critical”.

“We have a lot of support [from residents],” Zoe Mayou, regional officer at Unite, said during a demonstration last week.

“We are not doing this strike to hold the city to ransom.”

She added that many Unite members were taxpayers living in Birmingham and feeling the impacts of the industrial action themselves.

The city council said it had made a “fair and reasonable offer” to Unite and alternatives have been offered to the “small number of workers whose wages are impacted ongoing by the changes to the service”.

“Residents of Birmingham want and deserve a better waste collection service and the restructure that Unite is opposing is part of the much-needed transformation of the service,” a council spokesperson said.

The authority has added that its routes and working practices are fully risk-assessed and that health and safety is “everyone’s responsibility”.

According to external auditors, issues and missteps which contributed to the council’s financial turmoil include the equal pay debacle, inadequate budget setting, poor service management, demand led pressures and the disastrous implementation of a new IT system.

Labour councillors have also pointed to the impact of funding cuts over the past decade or so and how local authorities of all political stripes are struggling across the country.