We did some 'tracking' this morning at Transportation scrutiny - i.e looking back at recommendations made in previous reports to see if they have been achieved. The report in question was on Rats and Rubbish, and does raise the question of how many rats there actually are in Birmingham. It's often said that you are never more than 6 or 10 or 20 feet away from a rat, wherever you are, but I have no way of knowing how true that is. The most recent estimate I could find for the British rat population is from 1995, when it was estimated to be 5 million - certainly less than I would have assumed. Apparently a hedgehog census is undertaken by counting the number of squashed ones on the side of the road per mile to give an indication of how many hedgehogs are available to be killed on the roads, but I have no methodology on the rat estimate. We quite often get reports of rats at Kingstanding Circle where there is a lot of shrubbery, and an unfortunate tendency of some people to drop food which attracts vermin - I've seen a couple of dead rats in the area, but no live ones in Kingstanding as yet.

Littering - particularly food waste - may be part of the problem, but rubbish storage and disposal is the major issue, particularly as the majority of 'problem' rat sightings are near people's homes. There are a number of arguments for and against wheelie bins for rubbish disposal in Birmingham, and certainly there are parts of Kingstanding where wheelie bins would be almost physically impossible for people to use; that said, I don't know why we aren't looking at some form of container for disposal, because just putting rubbish out in black bags on the street is ludicrous in this day and age.