Edinburgh is facing a sharp rise in rat infestations after a strike by rubbish workers led to mountains of food waste, overflowing bins and rubbish piling up in the city centre, heritage leaders have warned.
The city’s rubbish workers launched a 12-day strike last week to try to force Scottish council leaders to improve a “ridiculous” 3% pay offer, with industrial action set to hit fringe festivals and artistic Edinburgh, when the number of visitors reaches its maximum in the year. the city center.
Public sector unions held a new round of talks with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla), the umbrella body for the country’s 32 councils, to consolidate a new 5% pay offer tabled on Monday. Strikes by refuse workers are spreading to other areas, with school and nursery workers taking part early next month.
Terry Levinthal, the director of the Cockburn Association, which defends the city’s architectural heritage, told the BBC he feared the piles of rubbish and overflowing bins would cause a human health problem, a concern supported by experts in pest control
Seagulls, rats and mice were already a problem. “We’re going to see, as a result of that, within a few weeks there’s going to be a massive expansion of the insect population because there’s just so much food,” Levinthal said.
Cosla and city leaders are under intense pressure to resolve the dispute, with the Scottish Government, Labor and other opposition parties trading insults and blaming each other for the crisis.
On Monday, Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, played down complaints that her government had consistently failed to adequately fund Scotland’s councils, making it much harder for them to fund a better deal. “We have provided more resources to local authorities to try to facilitate a fairer pay deal,” he said.
The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Strip are celebrating their 75th anniversary this year and hoped this year’s event would mark a joyful celebration of the arts after two years of Covid lockdown.
With Edinburgh city center packed with festival-goers, tourists and residents, the strike has left some pavements smeared with food waste, with takeaway boxes piled against overflowing bins, open bin bags and leaflets and food containers filling gutters.
A large pile of bin bags and open litter at the Grassmarket, a tourist hot spot near the Royal Mile, provided an unexpected backdrop for a film crew and actors filming a new Netflix drama series on Tuesday. Baby Reindeer is based on Richard Gadd’s successful 2019 one-man play on the sidelines, about his experiences of being bullied.
Some fringe acts decided to help clear the streets, fueling a dispute with strikers’ supporters who said intervening was a form of strike-breaking. Businesses in some hotspots, including the Grassmarket and Royal Mile, have been sweeping and tidying to keep pavements clean.
The Edinburgh Art Festival was caught in this dilemma. At the weekend he tweeted a plan for artists to meet on the Royal Mile at 6pm on Wednesday and asked people to donate litter picks. The tweet was quietly deleted, without explanation.
A spokesman for the festival said it now felt litter pick events would be “insensitive to striking workers. The cost of living crisis is creating significant and very real stress for many people across the country and, collectively, we must ensure that the workforce is treated fairly and appropriately. We hope that a solution can be found soon.”