Birmingham City Council v Unite the Union: High Court imposes £265,000 fine for deliberate breach of picketing injunction

In committal proceedings handed down on 17 March 2026, Mrs Justice Jefford imposed a fine of £265,000 on Unite the Union for deliberate and repeated breach of a prohibitory injunction relating to rubbish collection strikes in Birmingham. The sole issue before the court was the appropriate penalty; breach itself was not in dispute.

The dispute arose after Birmingham City Council ("BCC") removed the Grade 3 Waste Recycling Collection Officer role in 2024. Unite balloted its members in November 2024 — 95% voted in favour of industrial action — and discontinuous strike action began in January 2025. By mid-March 2025, uncollected waste in Birmingham had reached 22,000 tonnes, prompting declaration of a Major Incident under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

On 23 May 2025, Mrs Justice Dias granted an interim injunction restraining picketing to designated Assembly Areas at BCC's four depots and limiting pickets to six identified individuals per entrance. Unite had itself offered materially identical assurances days earlier, before failing to honour them on the very day the injunction was sought.

The breaches

From 8 July 2025, Unite members obstructed waste vehicles not at the depot entrances but in surrounding streets — slow-walking in front of lorries, parking cars to obstruct manoeuvres, and, on 18 July, engaging in conduct that led to arrests for obstructing the highway. BCC's evidence established incidents across fourteen days between 8 and 21 July 2025, the vast majority occurring away from the depots themselves.

Unite's response, relayed through solicitors, was that the injunction's restriction of protests to Assembly Areas applied only within the depots or their immediate vicinity — and that to read it more broadly would amount to an oppressive restraint on the right to assemble anywhere in the United Kingdom, including outside Parliament.

The court's findings on culpability

Mrs Justice Jefford rejected that argument with considerable force. She found it inconceivable that Unite, having offered assurances to confine protests to Assembly Areas, could genuinely have believed those assurances permitted members simply to reconvene a few hundred metres down the road to obstruct the same vehicles. She was satisfied that the "misunderstanding" argument was not genuinely held — rather, it was a position members and officials had persuaded themselves of after the tactic of off-site slow-walking emerged.

The judge noted that Unite took no independent legal advice when BCC's solicitors first raised the issue in early July. When advice from leading counsel was finally sought on 25 July 2025 — after the contempt application had been served — that counsel assessed the prospect of success on the interpretation argument as zero. A formal admission of breach was not made until Ms Kilcline's affidavit of 10 September 2025.

The guidance circulated to members on the evening of 23 May 2025 had itself described the injunction as applying only to "protesting anywhere else on the depot premises" — language the court found reflected where protests had been occurring at the time, rather than any considered view of the order's scope. It was not, in any event, a reasonable reading of what the order said.

Sanction

Applying the approach in HM Attorney General v Crosland [2021] UKSC 15, the court assessed culpability as high. Aggravating factors included the repeated nature of the breaches, the failure to respond promptly once they were raised in correspondence, and the absence of any genuine misunderstanding capable of affording mitigation. The harm, while moderate — the primary cause of disruption remaining the lawful strike itself — extended to public health and the reliable provision of essential services.

Mitigating factors included an unreserved apology (though delayed and initially accompanied by the spurious interpretation argument), the steps eventually taken to prevent further breaches, and the admission of contempt — albeit not at the first opportunity. The court also took into account Unite's financial scale: annual income exceeding £219 million, with membership of approximately 1.2 million. A nominal fine, the judge observed, would wrongly signal that the court regarded the breaches as insignificant.

By contrast with Secretary of State for Justice v Prison Officers Association [2019] EWHC 3553 (QB) — where fines of £95,000 and £115,000 were imposed on a substantially smaller union for deliberate breaches — the present case involved a larger organisation, a pattern of breaches treated in aggregate, and mitigating factors absent in that earlier decision.

BCC was also awarded costs of the application, with an interim payment on account of £170,000 payable within fourteen days.

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