Alexander Jan: Oxford Street pedestrianisation can benefit all, but has to be done well

Sadiq Khan’s surprise decision to breathe new life into his plan to largely pedestrianise Oxford Street is aimed at delivering improvements for its 200 million or so visitors a year. Despite generating annual sales of £3 billion, the street has suffered from London’s economic shift to the east and struggled more than nearby Regent Street and Bond Street to keep up with the ice-cool, managed malls of Shepherd’s Bush and Stratford or the chic, high-end offer of Knightsbridge.

Mayor Khan’s view must be that with the Elizabeth line now fully open, millions of additional visitors should have the opportunity to benefit from his ambitious scheme, and that shutting out traffic will help boost the recovery of Oxford Street as a premier retail and entertainment destination.

However, there are reports that Westminster Council – since May 2022 a Labour administration for the first time ever – is unhappy with how things have unfolded. After decades of dithering and uncertainty, the new council, in partnership with the New West End Company (a business improvement district), was, to its credit, beginning to deliver its own programme of improvements to lift Oxford Street and its surroundings. Now, the Mayor, backed by the national government, intends to create a Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) accountable to him, largely diluting powers held by Westminster.

Any revised plan is going to have its challenges It will be important to ensure that the momentum and the best parts of the existing project are not foregone. Residents who live next to the street have already started to voice their concerns. These will include displaced traffic and the prospect of more noise and antisocial behaviour. Care will be needed to prevent traffic shifting onto unsuitable residential streets. And “out of hours” disturbance is a constant and legitimate issue for central London residents in general.

That means there will have to be a proper management system to look after “the nation’s high street” and its surroundings, preventing it from being relentlessly dug up by utilities companies or turned into a place of rowdiness at night. As it has with Trafalgar Square, City Hall will need to work with, among others, the affected boroughs, Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police to ensure proper day-to-day control of activities that might otherwise undermine the benefits of a reconfigured Oxford Street. Yet if thought through creatively, these obstacles can and should be overcome. Radical, sustained improvement to this internationally renowned part of the West End could be a huge win for everyone.

More widely, Khan’s announcement brings into sharp relief a long-standing challenge for London government – how best to nurture and sustain parts of the city that perform important citywide, national and sometimes global economic and social functions while protecting the legitimate interests of residents.

The fact that the Mayor intends to use an MDC as his vehicle for change, rather than limiting himself to applying for Oxford Street to be transferred to TfL, suggests that there is a larger agenda in play, aimed at unlocking the full potential of the whole area. That is understandable, given the huge investment in the Elizabeth line that has been undertaken and the consequential potential that exists to grow the central London economy in the West End.

It will not be straightforward to reconcile conflicting views among different governance bodies and groups of people that the Mayor’s Oxford Street initiative has already exposed. But if a mechanism can be put in place to ensure that some substantial part of the benefits of the economic growth can be retained and spent on bettering the lives of local people, that would be a major step forward.

Many of London’s boroughs have suffered extensively from Whitehall austerity. For too long they have been left with virtually no incentive to grow their own tax bases because of the Treasury’s nationalisation of Business Rates. In 2022/23, Westminster got to keep a paltry four percent of the £2 billion or so it collected.

It remains to be seen how the implications of the MDC for wider questions about the development of central London play out. But in any event, if public services were more directly and visibly funded from increased local business taxes, that might make it easier to implement ambitious improvements in a way that helps everyone. For now, the five decades-old battle over just how to resolve the Oxford Street conundrum continues apace.

Alexander Jan is the London Property Alliance’s chief economic adviser and chair of the Central District Alliance and Hatton Garden BIDs. Follow him on X/Twitter. Support OnLondon.co.uk and its writers for £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE.