Spending a night hunting the rats running riot amid Birmingham bin strike
Armed with torches and a thermal imaging camera, Sky's Midlands correspondent Lisa Dowd meets the Birmingham residents battling a "rat super highway".
Friday 4 April 2025 13:10, UK
In Small Heath in Birmingham, the sun is setting on another mound of rubbish.
There are dozens of bin liners on the street corner, with puncture holes and rips, causing rotting food to spill onto the pavement.
"I've seen loads of rats here," says a man strolling past the pile. "People walk here and chuck their bags on top and I have to live next to it.
"Look at this," he says, as he gets his phone out of his pocket.
He shows me some CCTV footage filmed at his business premises nearby, and talks me through it.
"These are agency workers, brought in to try and clear up. As they're tipping the wheelie bins into the lorry, look at the rats scatter!"
The bin workers scatter too as the three rats are seen scuttling back under the mountain of rubbish they're trying to take away.
The workers are later filmed gingerly poking a long pole amongst the bags to check if the rodents are still there.
"This strike has got to end soon," he says, "the government has to step in".
He swipes to a photo of a rat sat on a windowsill. "This is my place of work, I don't like looking at them, it's awful.
"They'll be urinating all round the yard and I keep thinking of the diseases they could pass on."
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Another man beckons me over.
"You'll find some down there," he says, pointing to an alleyway with a wheelie bin overflowing with rubbish.
"I'm not coming with you, I'm really scared of them," he adds.
We watch and wait, armed with torches and a thermal imaging camera to identify hotspots of movement.
Sure enough, after a few minutes, in a dark crevice, we see one rat, then two, then three, then four.
"There's a family down there," whispers Joseph, a rat catcher who is helping us find them.
What strikes us is they're not too bothered about us being there.
Later, one literally stares into our camera, unafraid.
"The conditions around here are perfect for them - they have somewhere to hide, somewhere to feed, somewhere to stay warm.
"And over the course of a year, a rat couple can have 200 babies, they multiply fast.
"Even when this mess is cleared away, they'll be hanging around as they'll still think they can find food here", Joseph explains.
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Birmingham City Council declared a major incident this week, saying the "regrettable" move was taken in response to public health concerns as the rubbish piles up during the ongoing bin strike.
Local government minister Jim McMahon met council chiefs on Thursday in an effort to end the strike, saying the government would "support local partners in leading the recovery" as they "consider further interventions", but no new measures were announced.
Meanwhile, not far away, we find two dead rats amongst another rubbish pile.
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"The interesting thing about that is blow flies are now attracted to that - you can have 4,000 blow flies just from one dead rat… and over here is a drain leading to a sewer system - this is where they tend to come up from," he says.
"There's a whole super highway of rats beneath us now - millions of them."
As he lifts up a bag of rubbish, a rat scurries at speed across the pavement and out of sight.
They're the reason Joseph and his company have seen a 60% increase in people from this city calling them for help - that demand shows no sign of abating as the strike action continues.