Sadiq Khan’s latest proposal for Oxford Street is nothing but a blatant power grab

It is, at its core, a blatant power grab.

This time last year, Westminster Council was about to implement a fully-funded £90m scheme to redesign and improve Oxford Street, many years in the making, with the full support of local residents and businesses. £23m of this funding had already been spent.

All that stopped with a single announcement from Mayor Sadiq Khan, with little prior warning, that he was seeking powers to take over Oxford Street and impose pedestrianisation of the road.

He would also be taking sweeping planning powers from Westminster and Camden Councils through a Mayoral Development Corporation, the kind of intervention normally reserved for derelict brownfield sites, none of which are actually needed to pedestrianise the road.

So far all we have seen are vague promises and very little detail. Costs for pedestrianisation alone are rumoured to be at least £150 million, yet there is no clear funding plan.

And the Mayor has barely engaged with residents or businesses who will be most affected. He publicly criticises Donald Trump for being autocratic, yet fails to see the irony of him having the same approach to London Boroughs.

Worse still, there is no practical plan for how Oxford Street would actually function under pedestrianisation. Previous attempts failed for good reason: no solutions for rerouted buses, taxis, or delivery vehicles; no plan for premises without side or rear access; no safeguards for disabled and elderly Londoners who depend on public transport; and no thought for night-time workers or the economy that serves them.

These are not minor details—they are fundamental questions the Mayor has chosen to ignore.

Even this weekend’s single-day traffic-free event has very little detail about how any of these impacts will be managed, with little or no engagement with local communities.

And then there’s crime. The West End already suffers some of the highest crime rates in the capital, with 40,000 crimes per year in a single ward. Pedestrianisation risks making this worse, by creating more opportunities for criminals to operate undetected, and a more isolated and vulnerable environment for shoppers and visitors.

This is politics dressed up as planning. Rather than dealing with Oxford Street’s real challenges—above all, the crushingly high rents driving out independent businesses—the Mayor is proposing a top-down scheme that strips power from local residents, gambles with public money, and repeats the mistakes of the past.

Londoners deserve better. We deserve transparency, a workable plan, and a Mayor willing to listen rather than dictate. Currently we have none of these from Sadiq Khan.

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Andrew Boff is a Conservative politician who has been deputy chair of the London Assembly since May 2025.

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