Birmingham city council doubles agency spending during bin strikes | Birmingham
Unite has accused Birmingham city council of trying to “bust” bin strikes after analysis showed the council has doubled its spending on agency staff since the start of the year-long industrial action.
Birmingham’s bin workers have been on all-out strike since March last year over proposed pay cuts and reshuffles. The dispute left residents without a fully functioning waste collection service and led to increased waste on the streets and overflowing bins.
The Guardian’s analysis of Birmingham city council’s spending data shows it has doubled its spending on council staff across its fleet and waste operations, which includes rubbish collection and other rubbish services, following the all-out strike that began in March 2025.
The council spent more than £4.3 million on agency staff working in the department between April and December 2024. This has doubled to over £8.8 million in the same period in 2025.
Birmingham city council said it strongly rejected “any suggestion that agency workers were carrying out work normally undertaken by striking workers” and said it was an unlawful practice. The Labour-run council said it was using “the same level of agency staff as before the strike”.
A council spokesman added: “The figures refer to the waste service as a whole, not just the household waste collection service where industrial action took place… It would therefore be misleading to suggest that the figures relate to the council’s response to industrial action.”
But Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, accused the council of “breaking the law by using agency staff to break the strike”.
He said: “The council has consistently denied this, but the figures revealed by the Guardian show the truth. The facts are clear. The council needs to stop wasting Birmingham residents’ money on breaking the strike and resolve the strike instead.”
Rubbish workers employed by Birmingham city council began a series of redundancies in January 2025 due to pay cuts and role changes, including the abolition of the waste recycling and collection role, which Unite said would cost some members £8,000 a year. The council disputed this figure.
The council spent an average of £481,000 a month on fleet and waste operations agency staff in the nine months before strikes began in January 2025. This rose to £971,000 in the month the stoppages began and rose again to over £1.2 million in March 2025, when workers began an all-out strike.
The council said it had always used agency staff to cover vacancies on leave, sickness and waste. The more than £2 million spent on agency staff in January 2026 included “increased fly tipping clean-up crews, grounds maintenance and Christmas bank holiday pay”, it said.
Mark Stuart, professor of employment relations at the University of Leeds, said the case depended on “what the increased expenditure is for”.
“For the union the case seems clear. Expenditure on agency staff has doubled in the time since the start of indefinite strike action. This appears to offer at least some basis for Unite’s legal challenge,” he said.
Stuart added: “The council appears to be suggesting that it is business as usual, but it needs to show that increased spending on agency workers is not directly aimed at mitigating disruption caused by the dispute.”
The council and Unite held talks last summer but they collapsed in July. Unite claimed government-appointed commissioners were blocking the deal between the union and the council. But the council said it had “reached the absolute limit of what we can offer”.
In December, agency workers joined pickets for the first time over allegations of bullying and harassment. Unite, which was fined £265,000 earlier this month for breaching an injunction banning waste trucks from being stopped at depots, said strikes could last until September this year.
