Fly-tipping
Recorded incidents nearly doubled to 1,092 in 2023/24, then fell to 937 in 2024/25 — and collected tonnage fell 23.8% over the same kind of period. The strongest evidence points at cost and convenience in legal disposal, not indifference.
Campaigned on by both Portsmouth MPs, raised repeatedly by residents and councillors, and a recurring subject of local media coverage and community social media.
Real, visible and damaging to amenity, and concentrated in specific streets in Fratton and Central Southsea. But the measured scale is materially smaller than housing pressure, child poverty or NHS access, and Portsmouth records no large-scale fly-tipping at all — zero tipper-lorry-load incidents in each of the last four years. Residents also rate the city 1st of 111 local authorities for road cleanliness (NHT survey, 2024).
Two independent measures moved the same way: recorded incidents fell from 1,092 (2023/24) to 937 (2024/25), and Portsmouth City Council's own collected tonnage fell 23.8% between January–August 2024 and the same period in 2025.
The £19m that only counts 4% of the problem
English councils recorded £19.3m clearing fly-tips in 2024/25 — but that covers only the largest 4% of incidents. Government no longer estimates the cost of clearing the other 96%.
| Figure | Period | What it actually is | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| £19.3m | 2024/25 | Measured council clearance costThe largest 4% of incidents only. Defra discontinued standard unit costs from 2017/18, so the clearance cost of the other 96% is no longer estimated | Recorded |
| £924m ("£1bn") | 2018/19 | Modelled cost of ALL waste crime in EnglandESA/Eunomia study. Includes illegal waste sites (£236m), misclassification (£120m), exemption breaches (£87m), illegal exports (£42m) and waste fires (£22m) — as well as fly-tipping | Modelled estimate |
| £392m | 2018/19 | The fly-tipping line item inside that £924mNot a separate study. About 42% of the "£1bn" figure — the two must never be added or treated as independent estimates | Modelled estimate |
The £1bn and the £392m are the same study.Both come from one 2021 ESA/Eunomia report with a 2018/19 base year covering England. Its total is £924m — rounded to “£1bn” — and fly-tipping is the £392m line inside that total. They are not two estimates that corroborate each other, and must never be added together.
What both Portsmouth MPs said: “Waste crime costs the economy £1 billion every year, with nearly 1.3 million incidents of fly-tipping recorded last year alone.” Accurate as far as it goes, and correctly sourced to Defra's own action plan. Two things are worth adding: the underlying study covers the ENGLISH economy, not the UK; and its base year is 2018/19, now seven years old. It is also a trade-body study (ESA/Eunomia) cited by Defra, not an independent government estimate. Critically, the £1bn is all waste crime — fly-tipping is £392m of it.
Incidents rose sharply, then fell
Portsmouth recorded 937 incidents in 2024/25, down 14.2% from 1,092 the year before — but still well above the 751 recorded in 2022/23.
Recorded incidents
Defra fly-tipping statistics for England, by local authority.
Collected tonnage, January–August
Portsmouth City Council collected tonnage — a volume measure, not an incident count. -23.8% year on year.
Two independent measures agree — and Portsmouth moved against the national trend. Portsmouth recorded 937 incidents in 2024/25, down 14.2% on the year. Across England incidents rose 9.1% over the same period, from 1,152,632 to 1,257,863. Portsmouth moved against the national trend. Portsmouth City Council attributes the reduction partly to concentrating patrols on hotspots, better investigations, cameras, improved communication between Colas and the council, and work with the University around student move-out waste.
Enforcement notices issued
| Year | Incidents | FPNs total | Fly-tipping | Duty of care |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021/22 | 525 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2022/23 | 751 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| 2023/24 | 1,092 | 17 | 0 | 17 |
| 2024/25 | 937 | 38 | 6 | 32 |
A detail usually missed: of the 17 notices Portsmouth issued in 2023/24, none were fly-tipping notices— all 17 were Household Duty of Care notices, a different offence. Saying “17 fines for fly-tipping” is not accurate.
Why the council's “258 FPNs” figure cannot be compared with these
The council reports “258 fixed penalty notices for littering/fly-tipping since January 2025” (Portsmouth City Council, "Update on anti-social behaviour", 2 December 2025). It is not comparable, because:
- •It combines littering and fly-tipping, which Defra counts as separate offences.
- •Its window is "since January 2025" with no published end date — a partial calendar year, not a statutory financial year.
- •The council has not published the split between the two offences.
The one published breakdown, in a scrutiny review covering the 12 months to May 2025, was 393 FPNs for littering against 33 for fly-tipping — roughly 92% to 8%. If that mix held, 258 combined would imply about 20 fly-tipping FPNs, but that is an inference from an adjacent period, not a published figure.
Replacing "17" with "258" would be a worse error than leaving the stale figure. They measure different offences over different periods on different systems.
Two wards dominate the worst-affected streets
Fratton accounts for 8 of the 30 worst-affected roads and Central Southsea for 7 — both areas of dense terraced housing with high concentrations of shared housing.
What this counts
This is nota fly-tipping hotspot list. It counts “unauthorised waste” reports, a broader category — the council's own review notes kerbside rubbish “could be fly tipping but it could also be domestic waste or recycling that had been taken or commercial waste waiting for collection”. It counts reports, not verified incidents.
Worst-affected roads (top 12 of 30)
Roads in the top 30, by ward
Portsmouth City Council scrutiny review "Environmental Anti-Social Behaviour", published 6 May 2025 — the top 30 roads for unauthorised waste reported to the Housing Safe, Clean and Tidy team, April–September 2024 (1,075 reports across the 30 roads). Showing the top 12; Fratton appears 8 times in the full 30 and Central Southsea 7 times.
What happens to a report
The review published case breakdowns for three streets, which show how little of a report count is what a reader would picture as fly-tipping.
12 were duplicates. 8 perpetrators were found and fined; 8 were removed with no evidence of origin; 4 were gone within 24 hours; 1 was excess household waste. Reported by 17 Community Wardens, 3 councillors and 20 reports from 10 members of the public.
31 removed with no evidence, 17 nothing found on attendance, 11 duplicates, 6 in process, 3 fined, 3 educated, 3 trade waste, 2 taken back inside, 2 were simply out on collection day.
20 removed with no evidence, 9 the resident took the waste back in, 8 duplicates, 6 in process, 4 educated, 1 fined.
Across all three streets the commonest outcome is "removed, no evidence of origin" — which is why enforcement rates look low against report counts, and why report volume is a poor proxy for either incidents or culpability.
Worth holding alongside this
Portsmouth ranked 1st of 111 local authorities for resident satisfaction with road cleanliness
This sits awkwardly beside the salience of fly-tipping in local debate, and is worth holding alongside it rather than choosing between them. Both can be true: a visible, locally infuriating problem concentrated in particular streets, in a city whose overall street cleanliness residents rate better than anywhere else surveyed.
National Highways & Transport Network survey, 2024, cited in the council's scrutiny review
Counting warning: Portsmouth has at least three incompatible fly-tipping counts for 2023/24: Defra/WasteDataFlow records 1,092 incidents; the council's street-cleansing contractor Colas recorded 4,174 "fly tips"; and a separate council figure gives approximately 400 incidents for July 2023–June 2024. There are likewise three incompatible enforcement counts. These are different systems counting different things and must never be combined into one series.
Mostly household waste, mostly small
The typical fly-tip is not a lorry load of industrial waste — it is a sofa, a mattress or a few bags.
England, 2024/25. Defra's own reported bands — the size categories overlap and do not sum to 100%.
Cost and convenience, not indifference
The strongest evidence points at friction in legal disposal — and, notably, most councils say charging at recycling centres made things worse.
Specifically ease of BOOKING, not ease of disposal generally
Of 226 local authorities — "a great deal" or "a moderate amount"
Defra-commissioned research (NatCen). Government subsequently abolished charges for small quantities of household DIY waste.
"1 in 5 people have fly-tipped" — what that actually counts
The headline 20% is dominated by leaving items on the street or outside charity shops. The category most likely to genuinely qualify is 0.4% — about one person in 250.
The 20% is dominated by leaving items on the street or outside charity shops — behaviour many people would not recognise as fly-tipping. The category most likely to genuinely qualify is 0.4%, roughly one person in 250. The authors themselves question whether the broader category is justifiably classifiable as fly-tipping.
You don't dump anything — you pay someone £50 who does
A large share of fly-tipping never involves the householder dumping waste at all. Public understanding of the waste-carrier market is very poor.
Knew waste carriers must be licensed
Knew there is an online register to check a carrier
Knew they could be convicted if someone they paid then fly-tips their waste
A licensed operator charging around £100 must cover labour, transport and legitimate disposal fees.
An unlicensed operator can charge around £50 precisely because they never pay the disposal cost — they dump it, and the council, taxpayer or landowner pays instead.
The mechanism: That is a market failure as much as an antisocial-behaviour problem: the criminal operator undercuts the legitimate business by externalising the cost onto everyone else.
Keep Britain Tidy reports that councils attribute around 40% of fly-tipping incidents to rogue operators. That is a survey-based research estimate, not a Defra administrative statistic.
How waste ends up on the pavement
Neither “irresponsible residents” nor “poverty” is supported as a sole explanation. The evidence describes a chain in which each step makes the next more likely.
- 1The waste exists
Furniture, house moves, DIY, packaging, clearances, commercial waste.
- 2Legal disposal has friction
Cost, distance, no vehicle, restricted items, booking, waiting, inconvenience.
- 3A cheaper or easier alternative appears
Dump it personally, or pay a cheap unlicensed carrier to take it away.
- 4The perceived chance of being caught is low
A high maximum fine deters little if detection is believed to be near zero.
- 5The waste is dumped
- 6The cost moves to someone else
Council and taxpayer, landowner or farmer, and legitimate waste businesses who lose undercut work.
- 7The council clears it quickly
Which may itself create a further incentive — plausible and discussed in the research, but not quantitatively proven.
The research does NOT find that people on low incomes are more inclined to dump waste. It finds that the two biggest barriers to legal disposal — cost and ease — fall disproportionately on low-income households, and that enabling conditions cluster in dense housing: no car, limited storage, flats and HMOs, little outside space, difficulty moving bulky items, and frequent short-term tenancies. The researchers describe these as provocations or enabling conditions, not as evidence about the character of residents.
A local natural experiment: were the textile banks simply full?
Material was being left around textile recycling banks. The obvious assumption is that the banks were overflowing.
Of 749 textile-bank collections in August, only 5 were full. Officers concluded capacity was not the underlying issue at those sites — usage and behaviour were. Testing the obvious explanation changed the answer.
Where the friction is highest
The council's 2024 scrutiny work identifies shared housing and HMOs, and particular hotspots, as recurring issues — and records a suggestion for mobile household-waste skips in areas where residents find it hard to reach the Port Solent recycling centre. That is close to the mechanism the national research identifies: disposal friction leading to illegal disposal.
If Portsmouth wants to reduce fly-tipping further, is the next £100,000 better spent on clearing and enforcement, or on making legal bulky-waste disposal dramatically easier in the handful of neighbourhoods generating most of the problem?
This is genuinely testable rather than rhetorical. Portsmouth already holds hotspot locations, housing-density data, Colas tonnage figures and enforcement records — the ingredients needed to compare the cost of clearing the symptom against the cost of removing the cause.
Portsmouth City Council
The 2025/26 Defra figures, and the 2027 waste-carrier licensing reform
Report incidents to the council; check any waste carrier you pay on the free national register before handing over waste
One of the highest-salience local issues: both MPs campaign on it publicly, and it recurs constantly in resident discussion and local reporting.
Public and political discussion indicates what people are raising. It is not evidence that a claim is true.
Verified facts
Full detail — why it matters, who else is involved, what is being done
- •Portsmouth City Council — Clearance, enforcement, recycling centre and bulky-waste policy — the main operational lever
- •UK Government (Defra) — Penalty levels and the waste-carrier licensing regime, with reform due in 2027
- •Environment Agency — Leads on large-scale and organised waste crime rather than individual incidents
- •Residents and waste producers — Choosing a licensed carrier — checkable free on the public register
- •Portsmouth's own clearance cost is not separately published — Defra discontinued standard unit costs from 2017/18.
- •Sub-city geography has been published exactly once: a top-30 road table covering April–September 2024 inside a 2025 scrutiny review. There is no recurring release, no dataset and no map — and that table counts "unauthorised waste", which is broader than fly-tipping.
- •The council reports 258 littering/fly-tipping fines since January 2025 but has never published the split between the two offences, nor an end date for that window.
- •The split between household fly-tipping and waste dumped by unlicensed commercial carriers in Portsmouth specifically is not published — and interventions differ sharply depending on which dominates.
- •How much of the recent fall is attributable to enforcement rather than to changes in reporting or recording is not established.
Sources & methodology (2) · last verified 2026-08-26
What could be done, and what it would cost
Full action plan →UK Stat Pack's own analysis — not Portsmouth City Council or government policy. Each item states what is officially happening, if anything.
A visible local campaign on the registered waste-carrier database, alongside enforcement
Not proposed officiallyWhy it might work, and the trade-offs
This targets a documented awareness gap directly, at very low cost, rather than relying solely on an enforcement capacity that current numbers show is already stretched thin.
Trade-offs. Awareness campaigns alone will not stop determined rogue commercial operators — this is a complement to enforcement and the 2027 licensing reform, not a replacement for either.
How we would know it worked. Awareness of the waste-carrier register among residents (survey-based); Fly-tipping incident count trend