Portsmouth, in numbers.

Is Portsmouth getting better? Mixed. Buses, air, fly-tipping and preventable deaths are all heading the right way. Housebuilding, school absence, NHS dentistry and the council's social-care squeeze are heading the wrong way.

The pattern to notice: the things improving are mostly visible (cleaner streets, cleaner air). The things worsening are slower and quieter — a child missing half of school, a home not built — and get far less attention.

Who chose these? Only measures that are actually published, comparable over time and have a real good/bad direction. Population is left out on purpose — a bigger or smaller city is not better or worse.

Population here is a housing and student story, not a births-and-deaths one. The dips and jumps track how many homes exist and how many students are in town.

Two Portsmouths live on one island: a very young city (university, navy) and an ageing one. The median age of 36 hides both.

Careful with the number. The council's own 2025 report says 214,321; ONS later revised that down to 212,936. Never mix figures from different ONS releases — they are re-estimated every year.

Pompey looks affordable only compared with Hampshire. 7.2 years of pay is still far above the four-times-salary a mortgage lender will usually give you, and local pay is the lowest in the county.

The 11% delivery figure is the one that bites. Three years of decline means the council has lost the "presumption" that lets it say no to developments it doesn't want — the opposite of what most residents assume more control looks like.

Who can change it? Housing targets are set by central government (MHCLG). The council controls planning decisions and the local plan. With no spare land, most new homes come from converting and building up, not out.

The gap between £36.0k and £38.8k is the commuting gap: better-paid jobs in the city are being filled by people who live outside it, while residents travel out to lower-paid work or take the lower-paid jobs here.

High employment and low pay together point to a skills and job-quality problem, not a jobs-shortage problem. More jobs alone won't move the resident-pay number.

Inactive ≠ unemployed. 18.2% inactive includes students, carers, the long-term sick and early retirees. Only 4.3% are looking for work and can't find it.

The severe-absence figure is the one to worry about. 3.55% is roughly one child in every classroom missing at least half of school — more than double 2019 and well above England. A child at that level is very hard to bring back.

The EHCP rate almost doubling means a lot more children officially need support — but a plan is a legal document, not a service. The 2023 collapse to 1.6% on time shows the system can break under that load; it is now nearly back to the (poor) national level.

GCSE, NEET and the half-empty technical college point the same way: the pipeline from school to skilled local work is leaking — which links straight back to the resident-pay gap above.

Who can change it? The council (as a unitary authority) runs the EHCP process and absence services. Schools run attendance day to day. Funding rules and the 20-week deadline are set nationally.

Living three years longer than in 2001 is real progress. But 192 avoidable deaths per 100,000 versus 151 means around 40 extra early deaths a year in a city this size that better prevention or treatment would have caught.

The dentist number is the sharpest fall on this page: from four in ten adults to fewer than three in ten in five years. That is contract failure, not people choosing to skip check-ups.

Read hospital numbers carefully. Anything about QA's waiting lists or A&E describes 675,000 people, not Portsmouth. City-level health data comes from the council's public-health team and OHID, not the hospital.

The environment story is a real success: air pollution has more than halved since 2018, fly-tipping is falling against the national grain, buses have fully recovered. These were the result of specific decisions — a Clean Air Zone, enforcement, bus funding.

Crime: 120.7 per 1,000 sounds alarming, but city centres always record more crime than the leafy districts they're ranked against — Southampton is identical. The direction (down) matters more than the rank.

Southsea East and Eastney are a mile apart and get opposite ratings. One outfall, not the whole seafront. The fix sits with Southern Water and the regulator, not the council.

Who can change it? Crime — Hampshire & IoW Police and the Police & Crime Commissioner. Sewage — Southern Water / Ofwat / Environment Agency. Empty shops — landlords and business rates (set nationally). Asylum placements — Home Office, not the council.

60p in every £1 on social care is why the bins, libraries, parks and roads feel squeezed: they share the other 40p, and it is shrinking every year. This is a national pattern, but Portsmouth's demand is rising faster than its budget.

Reserves look healthy at £22m, but the minimum keeps rising — the council has less genuine headroom than the headline suggests.

The merger is the biggest change on this page. Within a few years "Portsmouth City Council" will not exist; decisions about the island will be taken by an authority that also covers Gosport, Fareham and Havant.

Almost a third of Pompey's children grow up in low-income homes after rent is paid — and in Charles Dickens ward it is more than one in three. That single number sits behind the absence, GCSE and health figures above.