Residents have expressed relief that Birmingham’s huge backlog of rubbish has begun to be cleared – but anger towards the city council remains.

For the past few weeks, enormous piles of bin bags have been blighting many neighbourhoods due to the strike, which was triggered by a dispute between the council and Unite the union.

Selly Park is one such area, with residents forced to watch as a huge heap of waste on a street corner grew in size metres from their front doors.

The mountain of rubbish in Kitchener Road continued to be an unpleasant eyesore earlier this week but had been cleared by the time the Local Democracy Reporting Service visited the street on the afternoon of April 11.

The city council has taken extra steps to tackle uncollected waste in the city since declaring a major incident in early April and more trucks have been able to leave depots .

Despite the relief of not having to live close to an ever-growing pile of bin bags, many Selly Park residents remain frustrated over how the situation became so bleak in the first place.

“It should never have come to this in this city,” one said on Friday. “We shouldn’t have to live next to a mountain of rubbish.”

He criticised the city’s council tax hike of 7.49 per cent, adding: “We pay so much tax – surely they can do better than this.

“It’s an outrage.”

One woman living close to the rubbish pile described it as “disgusting” and said the smell was “horrible”.

She said cats had been getting into the bin bags and she had spotted a rat at the back of her house.

“It would be nice if they [the council and Unite] could resolve it for the sake of everybody,” she said. “It shouldn’t have dragged on this long.”

Asked what it was like living near a mountain of rubbish, another resident said: “It didn’t feel particularly nice – it felt like nobody really cared.

“It’s not a nice visual – it’s a relief [that it’s gone].”

On whether the council had done enough to tackle the impacts of the bins strike in the past few weeks, she laughed and said: “Definitely not.

“We’ve still got a lot of recycling that hasn’t been collected.”

Asked whether she thought the city’s reputation had taken a hit, she continued: “I think so – you go around and you feel embarrassed.”

Union leaders pledged earlier this week to ballot Birmingham’s bins workforce over whether to accept a ‘new deal’ to end the strike.

Unite said the ballot would close on Monday evening and ensure bin workers remained ‘in the driving seat’ over their next steps, with the union backing them ‘100 per cent of the way’ whatever the outcome.

The dispute is over the council’s plans to scrap a Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO), which the union said would force “dedicated workers onto pay levels barely above the minimum wage”.

The council previously insisted a “fair and reasonable offer” had been made and “not a single worker needs to lose a penny”.