Maybe. Probably not. If you were to put all your lead in the waist pockets around your hips, would your trim be such that you'd be head up feet down, compensating by dumping some gas from your wing, expending energy and gas kicking up and down the water column and making a messy cloud of silt when you're near the bottom? I'm exaggerating a little , but you probably get the point. Enough lead too far forward or backward on your body and you're at the mercy of what that does to your trim.
If you were diving in a wetsuit, without redundant bouyancy, having some ditchable weight in case you have a wing failure at the surface is pretty important. Since you're diving a drysuit, you can close your exhaust valve and inflate your suit at the surface to maintain bouyancy in case of a wing failure, so ditchable weight isnt' nearly as crucial, which is why you see many drysuit single tank divers using heavy steel backplates instead of aluminum backplates and extra lead.
That said, I'm 99% positive that in a single tank configuration you're going to want to spread that weight out a little bit between your hips and higher up your back (behind your shoulders or on the upper cam bands) to maintain anything close to horizontal trim. If I'm wrong, and you're pretty close with all the weight on your hips, you can fine tune a little with how high or low you place your tank in the cam bands, but please try to make sure you can reach your valve just in case.
You're a "newly qualified diver" though, in your own words. Before getting too precise about where you should be mounting your lead, first step is to make sure that the "no small amount" of weight you carry is the best amount. Do a good weight check, as for some help if you're not sure what that means, but essentially with a nearly empty tank, drysuit valve full open and a completely empty wing, you should have just enough lead to hold a stop at around 4-6 meters. Any more lead and you're just making it more difficult on yourself. At the end of your next dive in calm conditions and shallow water, hand some weight to your buddy a kg at a time and see how much you can pass off and still manage to hold your stop with normal breathing.
Once you figure out exactly how much weight you need (typically much less than you're currently carrying), then you can spend some time on a shallow platform, put half the weight in your hip pockets, hold the rest in your hands, and figure whereabouts on your body puts you in pretty good natural trim without needing to try too hard. Have a buddy get you nice and horizontal for efficient finning, but stay motionless as possible, put a couple kg in each hand, hold them about even with your shoulders, and see if you start rotating forward or back, adjust as necessary, tweak as much as you like, take what you learn from that excercise to decision how much weight to store where.
As a recently qualified diver, I was diving with 6-8kg of lead in a drysuit, steel backplate, and a single steel tank. After spending some time diving, getting everything dialed in, the only reason I would bring even 2kg of lead with me was for trim, and that was better placed in trim pockets behind my shoulder blades or on a small weight plate on my shoulder straps than in waist pockets, your weight requirements and placement will be different than mine, based on your gear, tank, fin weight and undergarments.
