The UK street where ‘rats as big as cats’ scurry around in ‘broad daylight’

Shocking footage has emerged showing nearly a dozen rats brazenly rooting through rubbish in a UK town in broad daylight because of a fly-tipping problem that has lasted “for years”.

Councillor Stephen Bullcock, who is a Liberal Democrat representing the Kingston ward in Barnsley, South Yorks, has shared the worrying footage with Express.co.uk in the hope of tackling a vermin tide plaguing his town.

Cllr Bullcock claimed the council have known about the problem of discarded waste for years, but the area overrun with rodents had become like an “unofficial urban tip”.

He added: “There’s rats as big as cats. On the video there are rats literally running about everywhere, it was a Friday afternoon and it’s not an exaggeration to say there must be at least 10 rats there.

“If there are that many rats around in the middle of the day when they are more cautious, imagine what it is like at night. It is frightening if you think of the diseases that rats can spread. I don’t think we’ll get the plague of course, but it’s not nice when you think there are children nearby playing in back gardens and rats are running around urinating everywhere.”

Cllr Bullcock praised the council for responding to reports and clearing dumped rubbish, but he said it wasn’t solving the problem because the rubbish, and the rats, kept reappearing.

He continued “On the whole the council have been very good at reacting, but it is the proactiveness that is missing, where is the education? Have the people living there got sufficient bins?

“The council are forever employing more and more enforcement people, but you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘what are they actually bringing to the table?’.

“These are domestic bags of rubbish being dumped, and I can go out every week and pick up 10 to 15 incidents here on the outskirts of Barnsley town centre.”

Cllr Bullcock claimed the problem area had several privately-owned homes of multiple occupancy (HMOs) and that people had been seen dumping rubbish bags “out of windows”.

According to the pest control firm Rentokil “rodents are thought to be responsible for more deaths than all the wars over the last 1,000 years”.

In medieval times, fleas carried by rats brought the plague, known as the Black Death, to Europe, which killed around 50 million people.

Today, rats can spread the flu-like leptospirosis (Weil’s disease) and “in rare cases the disease can be fatal”, according to the UK Health and Safety Executive.

Councillor James Higginbottom, Cabinet Spokesperson for Environment and Transport in the town, said: “Littering and fly-tipping is an appalling blight on our communities and something we take very seriously, with our teams doing everything they can to clear dumped waste in our borough quickly and bring fly-tippers to justice.

“We’re aware of this particular issue on Burleigh Street. Our domestic waste collection, pest control and town centre cleaning teams are increasing their presence around Burleigh Street, helping us to address this problem and remove fly-tipping quickly.

“We’ve been in contact with the landlord of the building to request that modifications are made to stop residents from fly-tipping their rubbish and will continue working with them to find a solution. We will continue to work closely with the community and with Central Ward councillors to tackle this issue.”