SOUTHAMPTON has seen a rise in sales of black market cigarettes, a survey has revealed.

A survey focusing on empty discarded cigarette packets found that 25.88 per cent collected in the last quarter of 2012 were wither illegal or bought outside the UK.

This is compared to 11.8 per cent in the same quarter of 2011 - a rise of 14 per cent.

It comes as after one of the biggest ever hauls of smuggled cigarettes was discovered in the city.

More than 30 million cigarettes were seized at the city's container port in a shipment that was supposed to be full of wind turbines.

The survey was carried out by MSIntelligence which found a third of all packs across the South East were from the black market.

Despite the rise, the city is deemed just above the national average, ranking 47th out of 105 cities surveyed.

Portsmouth is the sixth worse surveyed in the UK with 42.12 per cent of packets collected being counterfeit.

The figures do not include hand-rolled tobacco, for which HMRC estimates as much as half of UK consumption is sourced on the black market.

HMRC also estimates that smuggled cigarettes cost the taxpayer up to £3.6billion in revenue during the 2009-10 financial years.

More than 12,000 packs from streets and easy access bins were tested in 105 cities in the UK.

Will O'Reilly, a former detective chief inspector at Scotland Yard, has been carrying out research since November 2011 on behalf of cigarette company Philip Morris International to gain an understanding of the illicit cigarette trade in the UK.

He said: “Just as armed robberies of the 70s and 80s made way for the drugs trade and large scale fraud in the 90s, so a new crime of choice has emerged, which carries even less risk and even greater profits.

“The trade in illicit tobacco has become the primary source of revenue for some criminal gangs and terrorist groups and it has already reached epidemic proportions in some parts of the UK.”