Kevin Hollinrake

“I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement. I am sure that the fact that both my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and I tabled an urgent question on this issue played a part in the Minister coming to the House today. He has said nothing on this matter for the 20 days in which it has been a live issue. It is shameful—a national embarrassment—that one of our nation’s great cities, our second city, finds itself in such a bleak situation. As the Minister admits, the problem is of the council’s own making. It is a result of the flawed deal with Unite back in 2017, which led to legal action over equal pay, but it is the people who pay the price. We have had mountains of rubbish blighting the streets of Birmingham for more than 20 days, and there is no end in sight to the dispute with Labour’s union paymasters, Unite. Almost every area is plagued by overflowing bins, rats the size of cats, and opportunistic fly-tippers exploiting the chaos to turn open spaces into dumping grounds. That is the reality of Labour in local government. From Edgbaston to Sutton Coldfield, from Yardley to Erdington, and from Balsall Heath to Sparkhill, the piles of waste grow even higher. This is a public health emergency, as the hon. Member for Birmingham Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) has conceded. Even the Labour Mayor of the West Midlands has said that he is “fed up” with waste piling up and the streets being filthy. That is why we call for a Cobra-led response. This issue demands a co-ordinated effort across local and national Government, harnessing the expertise of public health officials, civil contingencies professionals and emergency services. We call on the Government to cut councillor allowances for the cabinet members who got Birmingham into this mess, and we urge the Government to appoint binmen from the private sector to clear up Labour’s mess. Where are Labour’s MPs today? I can only see one on the Government Benches. [Interruption.] Okay, there are two here, out of 10. While they have been campaigning for an airport in Kashmir, we are proposing workable solutions. The Minister talks about the calm leadership of Councillor Cotton. What local residents need is action, not buzzwords, both from the local leadership and from central Government. He says that Ministers cannot legally intervene in this industrial action. Is he honestly saying that he has no influence with the union involved, Unite, which is complicitly holding the city hostage, and which contributed £10,000 to the Deputy Prime Minister’s election war chest? Surely she is now duty-bound to pick up the phone and speak truth to the real power behind the Labour throne, the unions. Incredibly, Unite is calling on central Government not to live within its means, but to make hundreds of millions of pounds available to the council. Is that something that the Minister is considering? He talks about an increase of 9.8%, or £131 million, in the council’s core spending power for the forthcoming year. Will he confirm that a significant part of that is being raised by means of a council tax increase of 7.8%, and that that is a clear breach of the Prime Minister’s pledge to freeze council tax this year? I pay particular tribute to Councillor Bobby Alden and the Birmingham Conservatives who, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coalfield, have been doggedly holding the council’s incompetent leadership to account. They have clear solutions to this crisis. Now that Birmingham has today declared a major incident, leading to the availability of new mechanisms, can the Minister confirm that he will meet them to ensure that those mechanisms are considered? I find it extraordinary that the Minister should say that Birmingham city council has not yet requested national support. Will he not insist that it do so immediately? He also said that he would meet local leaders and commissioners. Given that this crisis has been ongoing for 20 days and counting, why has he not already met those local leaders, and when will he do so? Will it be this very week?”