Birmingham’s basic services are collapsing as council mismanagement leaves city flooded and filthy

I was driving into Birmingham last week during the downpour. Just when you thought Birmingham couldn’t slide any further, the weather exposed the rot even more brutally.

The flooding wasn’t biblical rainfall, a once-in-a-century storm. It was standard British rain - heavy, yes, but nothing the city’s drainage system shouldn’t comfortably handle. Yet its streets were flooded like the River Rea had suddenly burst its banks. Cars ploughed through knee-deep water. Pavements vanished under fast-flowing streams. Residents in Kings Heath, Yardley and Erdington filmed their roads turning into temporary lakes in real time.

And why? Because the gullies were blocked. Because drains hadn’t been cleared. Because basic street maintenance - one of the first duties of a functioning council - had been sacrificed on the altar of financial meltdown created by years of incompetence and, frankly, corruption.

The city’s councillors should all hand their heads in shame with their diabolical mismanagement.

When a council is too broke to clean drains, too disorganised to collect rubbish, and too preoccupied with internal crises to serve its own citizens, that’s not austerity.

Birmingham’s basic services are collapsing as council mismanagement leaves city flooded and filthy West Midlands Fire Service

That’s collapse.

Residents like my elderly mother are paying record-high Council Tax for record-low services. What they’re getting isn’t value - it’s insult. They’re being asked to tighten their belts while the people who created this crisis hide behind buzzwords and bureaucratic fog. The truth is simple and unforgiving: Birmingham City Council has squandered its money, its integrity, and the trust of the people it’s meant to serve.

The truth is that Birmingham City Council has failed its residents because it has failed to run itself honestly, competently and transparently. And now the consequences of years of financial incompetence, political infighting and outright mismanagement are piling up on the streets - literally.

It’s utter rubbish.

Walk through any neighbourhood and the evidence of civic collapse hits you in the nose before it hits your eyes. Bins overflowing for nearly 300 days. Black bags stacked in alleyways like sandbags in a war zone. Rats darting across pavements in broad daylight, fattened by the mountain of uncollected refuse.

This isn’t a minor hiccup; this is a full-blown breakdown of the most basic service a council must provide.

Its councillors keep muttering about ‘budget pressures’ and ‘operational difficulties.’ What they don’t mention is the root of those pressures: years of disastrous financial decisions, ballooning equal pay liabilities that ballooned because no one in the leadership had the integrity or competence to address them in time, and a culture that prioritised internal deals, political favour-trading and bureaucratic empire-building over the needs of actual residents. Money didn’t just disappear - it was mismanaged, or worse, siphoned into doomed vanity schemes while essential services were left to rot.

The result? A city in decay.

Residents from Handsworth to Hall Green are reporting the same horror stories: rubbish festering outside homes, gulls tearing open split bags, children navigating piles of refuse on the way to school. People are posting videos of rats the size of small cats rummaging through bins in broad daylight. This is a public health failure of the council’s own making. And when councils fail at sanitation, they fail at civilisation. It’s that simple.

This city deserves better. It deserves leadership that isn’t mired in scandal. It deserves budgets managed with competence, not chaos. It deserves streets cleared of rubbish, drains cleared of debris, and a council cleared of the culture that let things get this bad.

Birmingham didn’t fail itself. The council failed Birmingham. And until residents start demanding accountability - not platitudes, not PR spin, but real accountability- the decay will continue.

It’s time to stop accepting excuses. It’s time to stop stepping over rubbish and wading through floodwater. We’re dealing with a third rate council, serving - what looks increasingly like - a third world city!