James Ford: Cars are hardly Oxford Street’s biggest problem, so why does the Mayor insist on pretending they are?

James Ford is a columnist for City AM and a former adviser on transport policy to Boris Johnson when Mayor of London.

The Mayor of London has decided that he – and only he – can fix Oxford Street. That is why he has created the Oxford Street Development Corporation (OSDC) to run the nation’s high street as a Mayoral Development Corporation. Given that no Mayor of London ever turns down extra powers and every occupant of City Hall since the post was established in 2000 has claimed that they wanted to pedestrianise Oxford Street but failed to do so, City Hall’s decision to seize control of the thoroughfare should have surprised no one.

Unfortunately for Londoners and retailers, Sadiq Khan’s pitch for power over the West End is inherently flawed. Pedestrianising Oxford Street will not solve the area’s issues. Cars, dear reader, are not really Oxford Street’s biggest problem. Far from it. Even before City Hall started rolling the pitch for the OSDC, ordinary motorists could not drive along Oxford Street between 7am and 7pm from Monday til Saturday. In fact, that has been the case since the 1970s. We must, therefore, acknowledge that, if Oxford Street has a traffic problem, then that problem is really about the number of buses traversing the thoroughfare rather than the number of cars.

According to a 2017 study by London TravelWatch: “If Oxford Street was a bus depot, it would be the largest in Europe.” Whilst a long-standing driver of congestion and traffic delays along Oxford Street, bus numbers have been falling under the mayoralties of both Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan. Since 2010, the number of buses traversing Oxford Street per hour have dropped from 300 to around 70. Although 16 different bus routes (and 200,000 bus passengers per day) still travel down the thoroughfare, this is a vast reduction from when Johnson described the street as being “bisected by a panting wall of red metal” in 2008.

Of course, the mayor will not admit that buses are the problem. Why? Because, as Chair of Transport for London, he is responsible for the number of buses that use Oxford Street and already has the power to redirect or reroute them. He could have done this without the creation of the OSDC. However, that would undermine the case for more powers.

Pedestrianising Oxford Street will banish buses to adjacent streets (inconveniencing passengers and residents like), but will that be enough to solve the West End’s real woes? Of course not. The mayor will not want to admit it, but crime is far more of a concern to the businesses and shoppers of the West End than buses. I have written elsewhere about Sadiq Khan’s desperate attempts to gaslight Londoners about the crime rate through the selective use of certain crime statistics, but the West End in particular has a serious street crime problem. Not only has Curry’s installed purple adverts warning customers to ‘Mind the Grab’ on Oxford Street, but Harrods has given in to customer demands to offer unmarked shopping bags so its shoppers are not robbed upon leaving. Recent stats from the Met Police have revealed that an average of 31 mobile phones are snatched a day on London’s thirty most crime-ridden streets. Top of that list of phone theft hotspots? Oxford Street of course, with 8,745 reported thefts in just under two years. Nearby Regent Street was in second place with 2,294 incidents over the same period.

Sadly, phone thefts and shoplifting are not the only crime problems that the West End is battling. A 2025 study by Policy Exchange found that knife crime in the capital had soared by 58% between 2021 and 2024 (and was up by 86% over a decade). Just 20 streets around Oxford Circus and Regent Street accounted for one in every 15 knife attacks across the capital. Whether we believe that crime in the West End is a real problem or, as the mayor would have us believe, a perception problem, it is unclear how pedestrianising Oxford Street will have any impact.

A car-free Oxford Street is also unlikely to serve as a silver bullet to solve the West End’s wider strategic policy challenges. The OSDC will play no role in tackling the candy stores that are fronts for money laundering and the Mayor has shown no interest in pursuing local business calls for business rates reform or to reinstate tax free shopping.

One of the best pieces of political advice in opposition has always been Napoleon’s adage to “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. And, whilst I am loathe to ever offer sound counsel to Sadiq Khan, I feel very relaxed about doing so here for three reasons. Firstly, it is in nobody’s best interests for City Hall to expend its political capital, exhaust its energies and waste vast sums of taxpayer cash forcing the wrong medicine down Oxford Street’s neck. Secondly, I’m pretty sure Sadiq Khan does not read Conservative Home so he’ll undoubtedly miss this warning. And thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – I doubt I am telling him anything he does not already know. I doubt that it will come as a great revelation to the Mayor that traffic is not the biggest issue holding Oxford Street back. I believe that his misdiagnosis of the West End’s woes is deliberate and cynical; the pretext for a shameless power grab. Never mind that Labour-controlled Westminster City Council (at least until May) already had an ambitious plan for Oxford Street ready to go. Never mind either that the mayor already has plenty of means at his disposal – fewer buses, more policing, significant planning and (soon) licensing powers – to improve Oxford Street. Even where the mayor does not have direct powers, he is supposed to be an influential local government leader with the ear of Labour colleagues at the top of government who should be able to lobby and cajole ministers into action. Yet there is no sign that he has ever tried to use his considerable soft power to shift policy in Whitehall to boost trade on Oxford Street.

It is hard not to conclude that, rather than the strong political flex it has been presented as, seizing control of Oxford Street is a hollow gesture. Instead of a manifestation of mayoral authority, this is actually impotence incarnate. Sure, there will be seating, greenery and al fresco dining. But what does all that matter if the real legacy of the OSDC is that all the shoplifters, street criminals and pick pockets can just cross the road more easily? If the fronts for money laundering stay open, our VAT regime continues to drive tourists away and regressive business rates force business under then the OSDC will have turned the crown jewel of UK retail into just another depressed shopping parade full of vape stores, charity shops and shuttered shop fronts. By narrowly focussing on traffic management there is a real danger that bigger issues will be not just ignored but allowed to worsen. Sadiq Khan’s true priority should be fixing Oxford Street’s real problems, not just inconveniencing motorists with an ill-conceived vanity project. But, as always, our mayor would rather look like he is doing something than actually doing something meaningful.