If I hadn’t had my kitchen done up, I wouldn’t be so worried about the Black Death. Reading in my sitting room one night after the builders had left a hole in the kitchen floor, I heard a rustling. Had a pipe burst? Had someone broken in?

It was worse - considerably worse. Poking my head round the kitchen door I was greeted by two rats dancing a macabre reel and leaping at our food cupboards. They were not quite the size of cats but they were big.

One was a good 8in long and that was before taking account of its long greasy tail. And while mice would have vanished at the slightest human stirring, these boys looked as if they might stand their ground.

In the days that followed, we saw more, lots more. I put down traps and poured poison into the rubble-strewn void beneath the kitchen but to no avail. We lay awake at night worrying that a rat was going to get into the bed of our three-year-old daughter, Nancy.

It nagged at us every minute - but most particularly when the creatures that had invaded our home chewed noisily at the floorboards beneath us. Rats, I have since learnt, possess incisors that grow constantly. To keep these fangs short, they are obliged to gnaw through wood, lead, bricks, concrete and even steel.

Chez Flintoff, we uphold the highest standards of hygiene of course. But in my area - as in many others around the country - the council has cut back its pest control services to divert resources to “priority” causes, most notably recycling. We continue to have our rubbish collected every week but this is London and overflowing bins are a common occurrence.

The result is rats - and lots of them. Recent estimates put the UK rat count at between 60m and 100m and climbing. After three successive mild winters and warm summers, rats have become fitter, stronger and much more numerous.

A female is capable of producing litters of 10, 10 times a year, and they have thrived as rat-catchers have been made redundant and rubbish collection has become less frequent.

Doretta Cocks, who started the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, says she has been overwhelmed by public support. “There is huge anger out there,” she said. “And it will only get worse as more councils switch over to fortnightly collections.”

I agree. One night a couple of weeks back, two of my traps went off. I went to investigate. One hadn’t moved. Another had skittered across the kitchen floor, but remained empty. The third couldn’t be found anywhere. I guessed that the rat, its neck broken by the trap, had fallen back into the void.

The next day, a dirty fug built up in the kitchen. It’s the smell of death and as I sit here today, two weeks later and three floors up it’s a hundred times worse.

That void under my kitchen is now full of large dead and dying vermin. Rats that have feasted upon the corpses of poisoned friends before succumbing to the poison themselves.

And what about Nancy? I don’t want to make her scared of rats - she already has nightmares about butterflies and ladybirds. But on the other hand we don’t want her to think that rats are lovely, and attempt to stroke them or share her food if one should suddenly appear before her. What should we tell her? NOT about the Black Death, that’s for sure. As every schoolchild learns, the disease - carried by the fleas on rats - appeared in Sicily in 1347, sweeping through Europe and killing nearly half the inhabitants in three years.

We think of it as a thing of the past - the last known outbreak in Britain was more than 300 years ago - but yersinia pestis, as the bubonic plague is correctly termed, is still with us. More than 38,000 cases have been reported recently to the World Health Organisation by 25 different countries in Asia, Africa, South America — and the United States.

In fact, there are believed to be more rodents infected with plague in North America than there were in Europe in the Middle Ages. Four countries have reported outbreaks after untroubled periods of 30 to 50 years.

I don’t want to get hysterical, but what if terrorists decided to use bubonic plague. But Vic Simpson of the government’s Veterinary Laboratories Agency says the disease could easily find its way to the UK without help from terrorists.

And the scariest thing is this: the plague has started to show signs of resistance to antibiotics. In March, the French Pasteur Institute reported that plague can pick up this resistance from all-too-common bacteria such as salmonella and E.coli — posing a global threat to public health.

Of course, rats don’t only carry plague. Two out of three carry cryptosporidium (a cause of gastroenteritis); only slightly less common are salmonella, listeria (which causes septicaemia), toxoplasmosis (blindness), Q fever, Hantaan fever, and the lethal Weil’s disease.

Not surprising then that in the run-up to this week’s local elections, Britain’s rubbish-strewn streets and fortnightly collections in particular have become an increasingly hot issue. Not for nothing did the government’s recycling quango, Wrap, advise councils to avoid introducing the schemes ahead of elections.

Of course Britain has long been perceived as the “dustbin of Europe” by its continental neighbours. Householders dump nearly 18m tons of domestic rubbish and nonrecyclable waste each year in landfill, covering an area the size of Warwick (109 square miles).

Now, however, EU recycling targets mean local authorities have to change. At present councils are expected to recycle 25% of their waste, rising to 40% by 2015.

Failure to meet the targets will result in severe financial penalties of up to £150 a ton. Adding to their woes is the spiralling cost of landfill, currently £24 a ton, rising to £32 a ton in 2008.

The solution, for many councils, has been a combination of fortnightly collection and investment in recycling. Described by experts as “alternate weekly collections”, they involve recyclable waste being picked up one week and domestic refuse being picked up in the next.

Chris Murphy, deputy chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management, said: “Councils have to improve or face fines totalling hundreds of millions of pounds. If they don’t look for alternatives and invest now, they will pay for it later.”

The trouble is there are no fines for councils whose streets become strewn with rubbish and whose rat populations boom. Shauna Lock, 36, from Bottisham in East Cambridgeshire, has looked on in despair as the bags of rubbish have piled up under her council’s fortnightly collection scheme.

“It’s a real pain,” she said. “My son Drew is two and we can’t have dirty nappies and food sitting in the garage all fortnight. The smell is horrendous. The pile will be humming in the summer.”

Another big issue is sewers, where water companies do little to eliminate rats. In most areas, barely a fifth of sewers are inspected as a matter of course. The rest are checked only if something goes wrong. It’s not unknown for retired engineers to be called out in emergencies and asked where pipes run.

Similarly catastrophic is the decision by 67% of local authorities to cut back on rodent officers. In Barnet, where I live, pest control was closed in 2004, and reopened only after complaints from residents.

But the service came back at a cost to users, and that puts people off: take-up fell by 75%, despite reported sightings of rats going up nearly 50%.

A spokesman for Barnet says the scheme is “budget neutral” because nobody wants to see council tax go up. But there are discounts for people on benefits, he adds.

According to the National Pest Technicians Association, the result of councils charging for pest control - and people declining to pay - is an increase of 69% in the rat population over seven years.

“Councils should not charge you to deal with rats,” says John Davison of the association.

As it happens, nobody was answering the phone when I called Barnet’s pest control. So like many others I went to buy poison from Homebase.

A recent study involving the British Pest Control Association indicates a new generation of “super rats”, able to consume previously lethal doses of two of the four most common types of second-generation anticoagulants. But my own rats showed an admirably old-fashioned tendency to kick the bucket after scoffing the bait.

Less happily, they chose to die under my floorboards, releasing the stench that made me want to heave and attracting an infestation of bluebottles, which lay their eggs in the rotting rodents before swarming about the house.

Clearly then, killing the rats wasn’t enough. I had to stop them coming into the house in the first place. I returned to Homebase and bought a device that uses ultra-sound — beyond the hearing of humans, cats and dogs — to irritate the rodents. But alas, my rats didn’t seem bothered.

In the end, I succumbed to the inevitable: I called Rentokil, which promised to keep poisoning the rats and removing the bodies till they stopped coming - then seal up any entry holes. (Do it the other way round, they warned, and the trapped rats will chew their way out.)

The fee was vast, but I signed up all the same, and Rentokil duly sent along one of its best technicians, Paul Boggia.

He leapt into the murky, malodorous cavity beneath the floorboards with something like the joy of a child entering a paddling pool, noted “signs of activity” and removed two stiff rats (“Out you come, Roland!”).

To say that I enjoy Paul’s visits would be an overstatement - I don’t relish removing 159 screws from the kitchen’s plywood floor, and replacing them all again afterwards - but I’ve learnt a lot from his brisk approach.

I can’t wait till he brings along a colleague with a camera that inspects drains for cracks from the inside. And I’ll be delighted when Paul finally declares that the last of the rats has died and that we can seal up the walls and install Rat Radar — a Rentokil-branded device that captures and gases rats with carbon dioxide, then sends you an e-mail or text message advising you to be rid of it.

In that event, assuming that I’ve not succumbed to Black Death, it will give me great pleasure to wrap the deceased rodent inside a couple of plastic bags, and lob it in the bin - but only for so long as we have a weekly collection.

My advice to you is to vote to keep yours for as long as possible.

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