Birmingham’s long-running bin strike could be nearing an end after Birmingham City Council and Unite agreed the ‘principles and parameters’ of a possible deal, council leader John Cotton said on Monday.
Cotton said the end of the dispute was ‘within sight’ and that the council was now in a position to make a new, improved offer after months of deadlock. However, no settlement has yet been reached. Unite said the detail would remain confidential until the authority tables a formal offer, after which members will decide in a ballot whether to accept it.
The breakthrough comes just over a week before Birmingham’s local elections on 7 May, with the strike having become one of the city’s defining political issues and a wider test of Labour’s handling of industrial relations, council finances and public services.
Cotton said any agreement had to be ‘good for workers’, represent value for money and avoid creating new equal-pay liabilities, adding that the council could not ‘repeat the mistakes of the past’. Unite, which has accused the authority of dragging out the row, described his statement as a ‘vindication’ of the workers’ campaign. Its general secretary, Sharon Graham, has said the union will continue to put members first and that ‘deals go to members — members vote on deals’.
The dispute, involving more than 350 refuse workers, began with discontinuous strike action on 6 January 2025 after Unite members voted 95% in favour of industrial action. It escalated into an indefinite all-out strike on 11 March that year. A High Court judgment later said the council’s waste operation employed 401 permanent staff and 348 agency staff.
At its core is Birmingham’s decision to abolish the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role and carry out wider grading changes in the refuse service. Unite says some workers faced pay cuts of up to £8,000 a year and has framed the dispute as a fight over jobs, pay and conditions. The council says the WRCO role is not an industry-standard post and has argued that reinstating it, or making payments in a way that could be seen as preferential, risks exposing the authority to fresh equal-pay claims.
That legal and financial backdrop has shaped the dispute from the outset. Birmingham issued a Section 114 notice in September 2023, citing equal-pay liabilities and an in-year budget gap of about £87m. In a separate update that year, the council said its equal-pay liability was estimated at between £650m and £760m as of 31 March 2023, rising by £5m to £14m a month. Government-appointed commissioners remain in place as the council tries to restore its finances. Unite has argued that commissioners helped block an earlier possible deal, an allegation that has not been publicly settled.
Earlier attempts to resolve the row failed. In March 2025 the council said Unite members had rejected an offer that included equivalent roles elsewhere in the council, NVQ training, LGV driver training, voluntary redundancy, a buyout payment and six months’ pay protection for staff moving to lower-graded posts. At that stage, the council said 41 workers had declined any offer while 35 had opted for driver training but were working ‘under protest’.
The service disruption became severe enough for Birmingham to declare a major incident on 31 March 2025. The council said roughly 17,000 tonnes of waste were uncollected and that vehicles were being blocked from leaving depots. It said it would normally deploy about 200 vehicles a day, but under contingency arrangements could only plan for around 90. Weekly collections that would ordinarily exceed 500,000 were reduced to 360,000 under the contingency plan, and actual performance was worse, the council said, because depots were being obstructed. The authority said reduced-service completion rates fell from 87% in the week beginning 10 March to 64% the following week and 17% the week after that, while daily waste accumulation rose from 483 tonnes to 655 tonnes and then to almost 900 tonnes. Recycling, green waste and bulky waste collections were suspended, and the planned introduction of food-waste collections was paused.
The dispute also moved through the courts. The High Court granted the council an injunction in May 2025 over obstruction and picketing conduct at depots. A further injunction against persons unknown was granted in February this year. In March Unite was fined £265,000 for breaching the earlier order and directed to pay £170,000 towards the council’s costs, with a further £90,000 to be assessed.
Talks at Acas broke down last summer, with the council later saying it had reached the limit of what it could offer, while Unite maintained that a ‘ballpark’ deal had already been scoped out. The union subsequently obtained advice from Oliver Segal KC and Stuart Brittenden KC that one-off compensation payments of £14,000 to £20,000 would not trigger new equal-pay claims, but the council did not accept that position. The question of whether compensation could be paid without reopening equal-pay risk has remained one of the central obstacles to a settlement.
The row widened further when agency workers also took strike action in December 2025, alleging bullying, harassment and blacklisting threats. In the same month, the council said its new waste-service model, including fortnightly residual waste collections, would begin rolling out from June 2026 even if industrial action continued.
Unite members voted in February to extend industrial action until September 2026. By the one-year mark of the all-out strike in March, the council said all 170 former WRCOs had either been redeployed or taken voluntary redundancy. Of 144 Grade 4 Driver/Team Leaders, it said most had accepted Grade 3 roles with pay protection and three had been made compulsorily redundant.
The strike has also spilled into Labour politics. Unite openly attacked the council’s handling of the dispute and, in March, cut its Labour affiliation fee by 40%, or £580,000, over the row. With Birmingham due to vote on 7 May, the dispute has become a major test of competence at a council already under intense financial scrutiny. Recent polling suggested no party was on course for outright control and identified ending the bin strike as voters’ top priority.
For now, both sides are presenting Monday’s development as a breakthrough, but the dispute is not over. The council still has to set out a detailed formal offer, Unite still has to brief members, and workers still have to vote on whether to accept it. No timetable has yet been published for a return to normal collections if a deal is approved.
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