Weeks worth of rubbish has piled up in east London after binmen went on a two-week strike over pay. Mounds of boxes, bin bags and crates have been discarded at the roadside and remain uncollected amid the walkout.
Lord Alan Sugar, who is from east London, said on Monday the “stock pile of garbage” was shocking. In a post on Twitter, he said: “I am riding through Bethnal Green Road in Hackney, my old manor. I am shocked at the stock pile of garbage that is all over the pavements. It is not days of stuff it looks like weeks. What is going on?”
Businesses are reportedly having to pay up to £400 a week to have their refuse collected while the industrial action is ongoing.
It comes after more than 200 council workers started striking on Sept 18 when Unite members rejected the national local government pay increase offer of £1,925, which the union said was below the rate of inflation.
Lutfur Rahman, executive mayor of Tower Hamlets, told the Evening Standard:
“We value our frontline staff and know how hard they work. This strike is a national pay dispute and not limited to local issues. It is in fact a response to the very real cost-of-living crisis felt by families up and down the country.
“Naturally, we are disappointed by the strike as keeping Tower Hamlets’ streets clean and litter free is our priority. We apologise to our residents and businesses and want to assure them we are doing our best to maintain services throughout.”
Who is Lord Sugar and why his name in the headline and photo caption? I looked up Alan Sugar and see he's some kind of business magnate, politician, and celebrity. But otherwise he wasn't even...
Who is Lord Sugar and why his name in the headline and photo caption? I looked up Alan Sugar and see he's some kind of business magnate, politician, and celebrity. But otherwise he wasn't even referenced in the article.
He's one of the most famous people here in the U.K.—as a businessman he became a household name with his company Amstrad (whose cheap tech devices were unavoidable here in the 1980s and 1990s) and...
He's one of the most famous people here in the U.K.—as a businessman he became a household name with his company Amstrad (whose cheap tech devices were unavoidable here in the 1980s and 1990s) and since then he's visible in a lot of other parts of life, perhaps most famously hosting our reality television series The Apprentice since it began in 2005 and being a common appearance in newspaper columns and the like.
Alex Barton
Who is Lord Sugar and why his name in the headline and photo caption? I looked up Alan Sugar and see he's some kind of business magnate, politician, and celebrity. But otherwise he wasn't even referenced in the article.
He's one of the most famous people here in the U.K.—as a businessman he became a household name with his company Amstrad (whose cheap tech devices were unavoidable here in the 1980s and 1990s) and since then he's visible in a lot of other parts of life, perhaps most famously hosting our reality television series The Apprentice since it began in 2005 and being a common appearance in newspaper columns and the like.