Reduce repeated dumping at known hotspots

The problem and who is affected

Portsmouth recorded 937 fly-tipping incidents in 2024/25, down from 1,092 the year before but above 751 in 2022/23. Most were household waste dumped on council land or pavements, and nearly half were van-sized loads. Nobody publishes how often the same streets are hit again, how fast waste is cleared or what clearance costs, so a falling total can hide repeat problems.

Who is affected: Residents of streets and alleys where dumping recurs, people who walk or use wheelchairs on blocked pavements, council cleansing and enforcement staff, and householders who pay unregistered collectors and can then be fined themselves.

What this would change

Aim: Reduce repeat dumping at the places that suffer most, clear what is dumped quickly, and help residents use legal disposal and registered carriers, while keeping enforcement fair and proportionate.

What success would mean: Fewer locations with repeated incidents and shorter gaps before waste is cleared, measured on a consistent definition over at least two full years, without dumping simply moving to nearby streets. No numeric target is proposed until a recurrence baseline exists.

Agree a written definition of a repeat location and publish a quarterly hotspot list from the council's own incident records. For each hotspot, check the likely cause (bin capacity, shared housing turnover, alley access, van-load dumping) and pick a matched response: extra or timed collections, signs and door-knocking, cameras under the council's policies, or duty-of-care checks. Run a plain-language campaign on checking the Environment Agency register before paying anyone to remove waste, timed to the new permitting regime from July 2027. Publish recurrence, clearance time, cost and enforcement outcomes together.

Proposed lead: Portsmouth City Council, Safe, Clean & Tidy team (proposal; not agreed). Partners: Portsmouth City Council waste and cleansing services, Portsmouth City Council communications, Environment Agency (register and permitting), Housing associations and private landlords, including shared-housing landlords, Residents' and community groups.

Powers: The council can investigate fly-tipping and issue fixed penalties under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, including penalties to householders who breach their duty of care (s.34(2A) and s.34ZA). Its current scale and approach are set by its Safe, Clean & Tidy policies (from 13 July 2026 and September 2026). The Environment Agency runs the waste carrier register and, from July 2027, the new permitting regime (SI 2026/873). The council cannot itself licence carriers. Publicity and camera use are limited by data-protection and human-rights law.

Options

• Current approach: Current approach. Patrols, reporting, clearance and the new penalty scale and publicity policy, with totals reported to Defra each year. No published repeat-location or cost measure.
• Proposed response: Hotspot recurrence plan with a carrier-checking campaign. Define and publish repeat locations, match a cause-specific response to each, run a register-checking campaign, and report recurrence, clearance time, cost and enforcement outcomes together.
• Alternative: Enforcement-led only. Concentrate extra officer time and cameras on hotspots and raise penalty volumes. Quicker to start, but risks moving dumping elsewhere and falling hardest on low-income households.
• Alternative: Prevention-led only. Lower barriers to legal disposal (more free bulky collections, easier recycling-centre access) without new hotspot targeting. May help households most but has an ongoing cost and does not address van-load dumping.

The choice depends on what the hotspot analysis shows. If most repeat sites are linked to collection gaps, prevention may do more than enforcement. If van-load commercial dumping dominates, enforcement and the carrier campaign matter more. Costs of each option are unknown.

Delivery plan

A first practical step: Council analysts could test a draft repeat-location definition on existing 2024/25 and 2025/26 incident records and share the results with the Safe, Clean & Tidy team. This uses data the council already holds and commits no one to a new service.

Costs and funding

One-off costs

Not costed. Likely items: analysis time, mapping, campaign design and any cameras for pilots.

Recurring costs

Not costed. Possible extra collections, officer time and annual reporting.

Capital or revenue

Mainly revenue; cameras would be capital.

Funding status

No funding identified. The council's September 2026 Cabinet report says its publicity policy would be met from existing resources; that does not cover this proposal.

Affordability

Unknown. The council is under budget pressure (see the public delivery record action); any extra collections would need to be set against clearance savings, which are not yet measured.

Costing still needed

Record clearance cost per incident for a sample period; cost officer time per hotspot visit; price extra collections and campaign materials; compare with clearance costs avoided.

Benefits, risks and trade-offs

Possible benefits: Cleaner, safer pavements and alleys at the worst-hit places; fewer householders fined for using unregistered collectors; better evidence on whether enforcement and prevention work. Benefits are not quantified.

Risks:

• Dumping moves to nearby streets rather than stopping.
• Better reporting or targeting raises recorded incidents, which could be misread as failure.
• Penalties fall on low-income or vulnerable households who could not afford legal disposal.
• Camera use or publicity breaches privacy or misidentifies people.
• Campaign messages go out of date as the carrier regime changes in 2027.
• Pilot sites are too few to show a reliable effect.

Who could gain or lose: Households without a car, with limited money or in shared housing may find legal disposal harder, so they could gain from easier access and lose from stricter enforcement. Streets in denser, more deprived areas may gain most from fewer repeats. Duty-of-care penalties fall on householders, not on the rogue carriers who dumped the waste.

Environment: Less waste left on streets and in green spaces; possible extra vehicle trips from added collections.

Capacity: Depends on analyst time to link records and on Safe, Clean & Tidy officer capacity. Staffing numbers for the team were not found in published sources.

How to judge progress

Reassess when: Reassess when Defra publishes 2025/26 local authority data, when the pilot report is available, or when the carrier permitting regime starts in July 2027.

Where things stand

What is known:

• 937 incidents in 2024/25, down from 1,092 in 2023/24 (Defra).
• Most Portsmouth incidents are household waste on council land or pavements.
• The council adopted a new penalty scale from 13 July 2026 and a publicity policy from September 2026.
• New carrier permitting rules were made on 22 July 2026 and mostly take effect in July 2027.

What is not known:

• How many locations suffer repeat dumping.
• How quickly waste is cleared and what it costs.
• Who dumps the van-sized loads.
• How many residents check carriers before paying them.
• Whether recycling-centre booking or charges deter legal disposal in Portsmouth.

Decisions needed:

• Whether the council will publish location-level recurrence data.
• Which hotspots, if any, to pilot and with what budget.
• How to balance prevention spending with enforcement.

Existing work:

• Safe, Clean & Tidy Environmental Enforcement Policy with fly-tipping penalty matrix: In effect from 13 July 2026 (as of 2026-11-02).
• Publicising Fly Tipping and Environmental Crime Cases Policy: Published; effective September 2026 (Cabinet report 22 September 2026) (as of 2026-11-02).
• Bulky waste collection service with one free collection a year for Council Tax support recipients: Operating (as of 2026-11-02).
• Waste carrier, broker and dealer reform (move into environmental permitting): Regulations made 22 July 2026; main provisions in force July 2027 (as of 2026-11-02).

UK Facts context: Portsmouth claims versus evidence (fly-tipping claim) (Local legacy page; its statement that Defra publishes no local household/commercial split should be corrected (see notes).)

Next review: When Defra publishes fly-tipping statistics for 2025/26, or when the Environment Agency issues guidance for the July 2027 carrier permitting regime, whichever is first.. Evidence last checked 2026-11-02.

Sources

Where earlier ideas went

• cleaner-neighbourhoods (earlier 12-point plan): expanded. Whole action: now/next/longer-term steps became the delivery table; baseline 937 retained and verified; measures retained in evaluation (repeat incidents, clearance time, cost, justified enforcement).
• waste-carrier-awareness (earlier ten suggestions): restored. Candidate option, intervention, delivery tasks (campaign draft, campaign with Environment Agency) and evaluation metric 'Register awareness'. Not carried forward: Unsourced funding route ('potential Defra local-authority engagement funding') and the 'Low' cost label; problem figures replaced by the latest year with the older rise kept as dated history.