A BOROUGH politician has been digging deep to pay for his own rat-pack to clean up the streets of Dudley.

WEST Midlands UKIP MEP Bill Etheridge forked out £500 to pay for the clearance of a rodent infested rubbish pile which was blighting Aston Road.

The clean up, by Dudley-based company First Fence, followed an appeal from resident Julia Stevenson for help to clean up the mess after she revealed her horror at being plagued by the vermin – including finding a dead rat in her two-year-old granddaughter’s cot.

Ms Stevenson said: “I am so, so grateful to Bill, his team, and to First Fence for their help. The council’s pest control kept having to come out but all the council was doing was papering over the cracks and fobbing us off.”

The junk, which included domestic appliances and garden waste, had been dumped in a road classed as private land by Dudley Council and the authority said it had been in contact with landowners but had no legal powers to remove the rubbish.

Bill Etheridge, who is also a member of Dudley Council and parliamentary candidate for Dudley North, said: “Dudley Council has failed the residents in this road. When proper, decisive action needed taking, environmental services stood idly by whilst the townsfolk suffered.

“I therefore, paid for local lads from First Fence to come up and grasp the nettle, quite literally, of this problem and clean up the alleyway.”