High Court fines union for breaching Birmingham bin strike injunction

In Birmingham City Council v Unite the Union [2026] EWHC 633 (KB) (17 March 2026), Mrs Justice Jefford issued the fine alongside a costs order after rejecting the union’s argument that it had misinterpreted the injunction’s wording.

Unite the Union members who are employed by the council’s waste collection service have been striking for more than a year in response to a decision to remove a waste recycling collection officer role from its operations, and introduce a ban on overtime.

The council eventually sought an injunction against the demonstrations in May 2025, after picketers refused to allow any vehicles to deploy from the council's waste collection depots – and following a campaign of walking slowly in front of the vehicles.

The injunction restricted picketing to the entrances to the depot sites.

However, Birmingham argued that the injunction was breached within days of the court granting it.

This led the council to pursue a contempt of court application against Unite, over claims that Unite protestors continued to obstruct or delay vehicles leaving the depots after the injunction came into force.

It also said that union members disrupted collections by slow walking in streets in the vicinity of, but away from, the depots and otherwise blocking the passage of the wagons.

At the High Court, Unite accepted that it had breached the injunction. However, the union said it thought that, while the injunction prohibited interfering with the deployment of vehicles from the depots and as they drove along the access roads, it did not prohibit protesting a little way away.

On this point, Mrs Justice Jefford said it would “make a nonsense of the Order” if, once the wagons had exited the depots, a few yards down the road, their progress could be obstructed by protests outside the designated assembly areas.

She added: “It would have been obvious to anyone giving the Order a reasonable reading that the purpose of the injunction was to stop picketing and protesting impeding the collection of rubbish and it is equally obvious that that involves more than the wagons simply being able to leave the depots.”     

The judge ultimately rejected the union’s submission that any of the admitted breaches were not deliberate and were the product of a misunderstanding.

She accepted the council’s submission that she should regard the culpability of Unite as high as she was “sure that there was at best a genuine belief that Unite had a clever argument as to the scope of the injunction but not a genuine belief that the injunction permitted protesting away from the depots which nonetheless obstructed the progress of the wagons”.

However, she also rejected a submission that the evidence as to what Unite understood the injunction to mean was positively dishonest.

“Rather, as I have said, it seems to me that members and/or officials persuaded themselves of their own spurious argument and, in that sense, came to believe that it was what they had always understood the scope of the injunction to be,” she said.

Jefford J went on to order Unite to pay a fine of £265,000 and to pay £170,000 to Birmingham for costs.

Commenting on the judgment, Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: ““Rather than resolving the dispute, Birmingham City Council’s own figures have confirmed they have spent £33 million of Birmingham residents’ money trying to break the strike. It won’t be broken - these workers are fighting for council workers everywhere.

“Unite is very relaxed about the fine, every single penny will come out of Labour’s affiliation fee. So, Labour will be paying for this one and any others that come our way.”

Her comment comes after Unite’s executive council voted to cut its affiliation fee to Labour by 40% (£580,000).

Adam Carey