Council & Money
Where Portsmouth City Council's money actually goes, where the pressure is building, and what its own finance officer and external auditors say about its position.
Where the council's contract money goes
Correct as of Contracts register as released 10 August 2026 (FOI2026/02585)Portsmouth City Council holds £414.6m a year in contracts. £71.8m of it — 17.3% — is with businesses registered in the city. £238.6m, well over half, goes to suppliers registered elsewhere in the UK.
2,326 contracts, £414.6m a year. Annual value, not whole-life value.
The headline 17.3% is flattered by one company. Ensign Highways is Portsmouth-registered and holds the highways PFI — £25.3m of the £71.8m local total. Strip that single contract, locked until 2032, and local share falls to roughly 11%. The real finding is construction: £147.1m a year, the largest category by far, with only 10.3% going to Portsmouth-registered firms on work physically done in the city. That is about £132m a year leaving Portsmouth on buildings inside it.
Whether 17.3% is low depends on what the council buys. Highways maintenance, social care placements and energy are national markets where no Portsmouth-registered firm bids. The useful question is not the headline share but which expiring contracts could plausibly be won locally — which is why the expiry pipeline below matters more than the percentage above.
Which of it could realistically be spent here
Not all of it can. The question is which parts could.
Work physically carried out in Portsmouth by firms mostly registered elsewhere. The largest category and the most obviously localisable.
Specialist placements go where the placement exists. Domiciliary and supported living are more localisable than residential specialist care.
Already 89% local, but only because the PFI holder is Portsmouth-registered. Locked until 2032 and not a repeatable win.
Bought through national neutral-vendor frameworks. The workers are often local; the contract never is.
A national wholesale market. No local supplier exists to buy from.
Software licensing is bought from the vendor. Little is genuinely contestable locally.
Vehicle supply is national; passenger and home-to-school transport is local by nature.
Legal, survey, valuation and engineering work with a real local supplier base.
Dominated by a single long-term disposal contract.
Not all of it can be spent locally, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: energy is a national wholesale market, agency staffing runs through national frameworks, and specialist care placements go where the place exists. Roughly half is structurally non-local. But construction, maintenance and professional services together are over £150m a year with a real local supplier base, and the spend recurs annually rather than being one-off — which is precisely the condition under which building local capacity repays. The usual barrier is contract size: a £13m facilities contract cannot be bid by a twenty-person firm. The Procurement Act 2023 permits both smaller lots and social value weighting.
Is 17.3% good or bad? Whether 17.3% is good or bad cannot be answered yet, because no comparison exists. No authority publishes local supplier share as a matter of course, and Southampton's and Hampshire's contract registers have been requested but not yet received. Until they are, this figure stands alone — which is why the category breakdown and the expiry pipeline are more useful than the headline percentage.
Categories are assigned by keyword against contract descriptions and are ours, not the council's. 1,130 contracts worth £122.2m a year matched no category and are excluded rather than forced into one. "Addressable" is our judgement of whether a local supplier base plausibly exists, not a procurement assessment.
When those contracts come up again
Contracts reaching their current expiry date, by annual value. £212m a year — roughly half the council's contracted spend — reaches expiry before April 2028, and a further £142m falls in 2029. The March 2026 reorganisation decision would have moved the 2029 decisions to a new South East unitary; it was withdrawn on 7 September 2026, so for now they remain Portsmouth's.
Largest suppliers by annual value
Two of the ten largest suppliers are not private companies: Solent NHS Trust and the Society of St James, a homelessness charity. Council contract spend is not the same thing as outsourcing to the private sector, and reading it that way would be wrong.
What a supplier postcode does and does not tell you
A registered postcode is where a company is registered, not where work is done or where staff live. A national contractor may employ Portsmouth residents; a locally-registered firm may subcontract elsewhere. These are contracts held by locally-registered businesses — not a measure of local jobs.
Portsmouth is PO1 to PO6. PO9 is Havant, PO12 Gosport, PO16 Fareham and PO30 upwards the Isle of Wight, so they are counted separately rather than as local. Figures are the register's own annual value column; the register's whole-life total of about £3.45bn spans contracts running from 2002 to 2032 and is not annual spend.
Released under the Freedom of Information Act. Re-use permission obtained from Portsmouth City Council under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015.
What the council has bought and sold
Correct as of Register as released 11 August 2026 (EIR2026/02586)Portsmouth City Council has been buying property, not selling it. At least £16.8m of acquisitions since 2020 against £2.35m of recorded disposal receipts — and nearly all the buying is a single street.
Largest single purchase: 315 Commercial Road, the former Sainsbury's, at £6.2m. The rest is a near-continuous run of Commercial Road retail units.
The properties acquired (28 listed)
- 191 Commercial Road
- 205 & 205A Commercial Road
- 225 Commercial Road
- 239–241 Commercial Road
- 257–259 Commercial Road
- 261 Commercial Road
- 263 Commercial Road
- 265 Commercial Road
- 267 Commercial Road
- 277 Commercial Road
- 279 Commercial Road
- 285 Commercial Road
- 287 Commercial Road
- 291 Commercial Road
- 295 Commercial Road
- 299 Commercial Road
- 315 Commercial Road (former Sainsbury's)
- 335–343 Commercial Road
- 6 Market Way
- 7–9 Market Way
- 10 Charlotte Street
- 12–18 Charlotte Street
- 4 Frederick Street
- City Buildings (ground floor units)
- Former Job Centre, Lake Road
- St Wilfred's Church, George Street
- The Bridge Centre, Fratton Road
- Tipner Lane — Pounds Yard
Disposals since 2020
Fifteen of the 38 disposals are leasehold enfranchisement claims, where a leaseholder exercises a statutory right to buy their freehold. Those are not the council choosing to sell. Strip them out and 23 discretionary disposals remain over six years, against 34 acquisitions. This is not an authority disposing of its estate.
The council has bought a high street and has not yet developed it. That is not in itself a criticism — site assembly is how large regeneration actually starts, and buying incrementally is usually cheaper than a compulsory purchase order later. But it has consequences that are visible elsewhere on this site: some of the 16.4% city-centre retail vacancy we report is the council's own newly-acquired stock standing empty while it waits for a development partner.
The questions this raises are answerable and not currently answered anywhere published. What is the holding cost — the rent foregone, business rates and security on 31 properties? What is the total actually spent, given 20 of the 31 prices are withheld? Is a development partner appointed, and if not, by when? And what happens to these assets on 1 April 2028, when the council that bought them ceases to exist and they transfer to a new unitary whose priorities are not yet set?
Three things would make this defensible rather than merely explicable: publish the full acquisition cost including the prices currently withheld; publish the annual holding cost; and publish a dated milestone for appointing a development partner. None requires new money. All three are within the council's gift, and all three would be normal disclosure for a private developer assembling a site of this size.
What these figures leave out, and why individual addresses are not listed
Disposal receipts are understated: 26 of the 38 entries record no price, pointing instead to HM Land Registry. The £2.35m is therefore a floor for disposals just as £16.1m is a floor for City Centre North. Neither figure should be quoted as a total, and the two floors are not directly comparable to each other.
The council confirmed in its response that all transactions were valued by its own RICS-qualified staff. No independent District Valuer assessment is recorded for these disposals.
The disposals register contains individual residential addresses — former council homes sold at auction. They are aggregated here by year and method rather than listed: a council releasing a list to one requester is not the same as this site republishing a directory of people's homes. The City Centre North acquisitions are named because they are commercial premises in a public regeneration scheme. The council also redacted personal information under Regulations 12(3) and 13 EIR where transactions involved private individuals.
Released under the Environmental Information Regulations. Re-use permission obtained from Portsmouth City Council under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015.
Revenue, not capital.Everything on this page is the council's day-to-day running budget — funded by council tax, business rates and government grant. Capital spending (building things, funded by borrowing and capital grant) is a separate budget and cannot be moved into revenue. A council can be building a leisure centre while struggling to fund social care; the two are not interchangeable.
£100 of council service spending
Almost 60p in every £1 of service spending goes on two things: children's services and adult social care. Everything else the council does — bins, streets, roads, parks, libraries, leisure, housing, climate — shares the remaining 40p.
Share of service spending, 2025/26 approved portfolio budgets. Excludes the “Leader” and Treasury Management lines, which carry investment income and are negative — including them would make these shares meaningless. Revenue spending only, not capital.
Social care is growing faster than the budget
Adult social care spending rose 64% between 2017/18 and 2025/26, from £45.4m to £74.3m. Children's services and education rose 62%, from £48.1m to £77.8m. Total net revenue spending rose 49% over the same period — so both are growing faster than the budget as a whole, squeezing everything else.
Read this carefully.Portsmouth renamed and restructured its portfolios in 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2024/25. The two social care lines are shown under the names actually published each year, and the pre-2021 children's figure combines the then-separate Children's Social Care and Education portfolios so it is comparable with the merged line that replaced them. Some other portfolios are genuinely not comparable across those breaks — Transport appears to fall in 2024/25, but the next year's report restates the same year £9.2m higher.
Band D council tax, up 42% in nine years
Portsmouth's own precept rose from £1,279 to £1,818 between 2017/18 and 2025/26.
Portsmouth City Council's own precept only — the bill also includes separate precepts for the Police and Crime Commissioner and for Hampshire & Isle of Wight Fire. Band D rose 42% between 2017/18 and 2025/26. In seven of those nine years the increase was at or just below the referendum threshold, and a portion was the ring-fenced adult social care precept, shown separately.
Reserves flat, the floor rising
The balance has barely moved in nine years. The minimum allowed beneath it has been raised twice.
The working balance has been remarkably flat — around £20–22m for nine years. What has moved is the floor beneath it: the minimum the Director of Finance will allow has been raised twice, from £8m to £10m and now to £12m for 31 March 2027. The balance is not falling; the assessed risk against it is rising.
Portsmouth carries no accumulated SEND deficit — it has a surplus
Unlike many authorities, Portsmouth has no accumulated Dedicated Schools Grant deficit. Its carry-forward was a surplus of £11.5m at March 2024, £11.1m at March 2025 and £8.0m at March 2026 (draft). The absence of a "DSG Adjustment Account" in its unusable reserves independently corroborates this — that negative reserve is what every deficit authority must carry.
But it is turning. That is now changing. For the first time, the council is budgeting a DSG deficit of £4.5m in 2026/27. The surplus has fallen by £3.1m in a single year.
A statutory override currently keeps DSG deficits off councils' main budgets, but it ends on 31 March 2028 (Regulation 30L, Local Authorities (Capital Finance and Accounting) (England) Regulations 2003). Government has confirmed that in-year deficits from April 2028 become its responsibility, but has made no commitment to fund accumulated deficits existing at that date.
Portsmouth is not in the DfE's Safety Valve intervention programme — consistent with a council that has been in surplus. The Isle of Wight, a likely reorganisation partner, is.
The council's own assessment: "Sound"
The medium-term forecast improved sharply — the previous forecast was a £9m gap, now £3m, largely because the Fair Funding Review landed better than assumed. The council itself calls the forecast "finely balanced" and says it could vary by plus or minus £6m.
“The Council's financial health is currently sound, but future risks remain relating to inflation volatility, accelerating cost and demand for Care Services, SEND and Homelessness as well as the uncertainty arising from Local Government Reorganisation.”
— Director of Finance & Resources (Section 151 Officer), Budget 2026/27 report, Full Council, 24 February 2026
Portsmouth has never issued a Section 114 notice and its S151 officer has not warned that one may become necessary. The only references in the budget report are the standard statutory description of the power, and an observation about the national picture.
Two disclaimed opinions — but not about Portsmouth's finances
The 2022/23 and 2023/24 disclaimers were NOT a finding about Portsmouth's finances. They resulted from the national local-audit backstop: auditors did not have the resources to complete detailed procedures before a statutory cut-off, and disclaimed opinions across many councils. The 2024/25 qualification flows directly from those prior disclaimers leaving opening balances unverified.
The one significant weakness identified for 2024/25 is on GOVERNANCE, not financial sustainability: "Weaknesses in the quality and safety of council housing and the Council's arrangements to address this." It follows the council's own September 2024 self-referral to the Regulator of Social Housing and a January 2025 regulatory judgement grading Portsmouth C3 — "serious failings in the landlord delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards". The regulator noted the council "has engaged constructively and acted transparently".
No significant weakness has been reported against the financial sustainability criterion in any year examined. No statutory recommendation, public interest report or advisory notice has been issued.