Labour abandons their key 2022 election pledge with move to fortnightly bin collections
At today’s meeting of Birmingham City Council’s Cabinet Committee, Labour councillors voted to push through plans to move to fortnightly general waste collections. The move comes as part of a larger programme to implement a redesigned waste collection service in the City, despite agency staff only last week joining the refuse workers' picket line over unsustainable workloads.
Under Birmingham Labour’s plans, due to be implemented in June 2026, households would move from the current system of one general waste and one recycling wheelie bin to an additional weekly-collected food waste bin. General waste and recycling collections would switch to alternating fortnightly schedules.
Local Conservatives argue that the proposal is being railroaded through without fixing the existing failures in the service. These failures predate the current bin strike and include recycling rates of just 23% in 2024 – one of the worst in the country, and 122,000 missed bin collections a year. While this year, recycling rates have collapsed to just 14%. When the Local Conservatives last led the City Council in 2012, the recycling rate was 32%, then one of the highest rates of any metropolitan Council.
Cllr Robert Alden (Con, Erdington), Leader of the Opposition & Birmingham Local Conservatives, said:
Residents will rightly ask how on earth Labour can justify pushing ahead with a completely new waste system when they can’t even get the current one working. The Council has been unable to collect plastic, paper, cardboard, metal and garden recycling for a year and yet Labour would have you believe they can successfully introduce food waste recycling during a strike!
Labour promised to keep weekly residual bin collections at the last election and then repeatedly voted to scrap them. They’ve lost all credibility on waste. Introducing sweeping changes months before an election, knowing full well they are unlikely to be in office to deliver it, is irresponsible and a waste of taxpayers’ money. It is now clear that only a Local Conservative-led Council will keep weekly residual bin collections.
If Labour aren’t going to fix their mess they’ve created, they should at least limit any further damage and stop spending taxpayers' money trying to scrap weekly residual bin collections. Only the Local Conservatives have a plan to keep weekly collections, deliver a cleaner city, and scrap Labour’s ‘rat tax’.
Cllr Tim Huxtable (Con, Hall Green South), Shadow Cabinet Member for Environment & Transport, said:
Residents are still dealing with bins left uncollected for weeks, attracting rats, and overflowing recycling. It is staggering that Labour’s response is to introduce a system that makes core waste services less frequent. You don’t fix a failing service by making it more complicated.
This new system alone will not fix Birmingham’s dire recycling rate or stop the constant missed collections. If anything, the risk is that it creates even more confusion & even more chaos.
A major service change should only happen once the existing problems are resolved, but Labour have shown again that they care more about headlines than about delivering for residents.
