Rats ‘bigger than cats’ are roaming Britain’s second-biggest city as garbage collectors strike

Birmingham’s garbage collectors have been on strike over pay, so some of the city’s 1.2 million residents have not had their waste collected for weeks. Mounds of garbage bags, some several feet high, dot the red-brick streets like pins on a corkboard

Will Timms is a very busy man. The pest controller spends his days criss-crossing Britain’s second-largest city to remove rats, cockroaches and other unwanted creatures from people’s homes. Lately, Timms’ phone has barely stopped ringing as some 17,000 metric tons of garbage have piled up on Birmingham’s streets. “The smell is absolutely unbelievable,” Timms told CNN. “You’ve got rotting food, you’ve got maggots on the floor crawling out of the bags.” Birmingham’s garbage collectors have been on strike over pay, so some of the city’s 1.2 million residents have not had their waste collected for weeks. Mounds of garbage bags, some several feet high, dot the red-brick streets like pins on a corkboard. In the Balsall Heath neighborhood, wind whistles through the puncture marks in one rotting heap where the rats and mice have burrowed in. “That’s a five-star restaurant for them and they’ve got a hotel to go with it,” said Timms. Business is booming — so much so that Timms, who works alone, cannot handle the caseload and has passed some jobs to rival pest controllers. He said the number of calls from people finding rats in their homes has shot up around 50% since the garbage workers’ strikes started.