The disturbingly hot summer, with its concocted media furore about “vertical drinking” and its heroic claims about late night alcohol consumption being a mighty force for growth, is fading into autumn (just about).

That doesn’t mean the heat has gone out of disagreements between Conservative-run Westminster City Council and Baron Khan of Tooting – still better known for the time being as the Labour Mayor of London – over the connected matters of the pedestrianisation of a portion of Oxford Street and the opening hours of licensed premises.

At the end of last week, as snortingly predicted by critics of the Mayor, Angela Rayner’s department gave its blessing to Transport for London to forego conducting a full and formal assessment of the environmental impacts of closing the famous road between Orchard Street (to the west of Selfridges) and Great Portland Street (to the east of Oxford Circus) to all traffic, which is expected to begin a few weeks from now.

For Westminster’s Tories and other local sceptics, this has confirmed their view that the Mayor is hurrying the project forward without thoroughly considering possible adverse consequences and taking judicious steps to avoid them.

“Rushing pedestrianisation to meet the Mayor’s arbitrary deadline risks creating serious problems for local people,” wrote Tim Barnes, a councillor for West End ward and Westminster’s deputy leader, in a letter yesterday to the Westminster Amenity Societies Forum (WASF), a group of civic societies.

“The Mayor’s own submission acknowledged increases in both noise and air pollution,” continued Barnes, who is also the council’s cabinet member for growth and planning, “yet important questions about accessibility, traffic displacement, bus operations, servicing and deliveries, and the impact on surrounding communities all remain unanswered.”

Meanwhile, on licensing, Westminster has today issued a press release calling on Khan to “increase policing and improve public transport to help nightlife in central London”. It says it has been moved to do this by responses to the consultation on its draft new licensing policy, a document little different from predecessors adopted in 2021, 2016 and earlier, yet denounced by The Guardian and Reform UK’s provisional mayoral candidate alike as a puritan assault on The Great British Way Of Boozing that had appeared out of nowhere.

The council says it would like more night bus services in central London, the Night Tube to run overnight on Thursdays as well as on Fridays and Saturdays, and “more visible and dedicated policing” in the West End during night hours. It also says that the size of the Met’s licensing team, responsible for evaluating licensing applications, has lately been sharply reduced.

Westminster’s call is essentially a restatement of its position that the biggest barrier to growth in the West End’s night-time economy is not council licensing rules but concerns about public safety and neighbourhood stewardship felt by residents and visitors alike.

Will it be simple to get home at the end of a night out? Will street rowdiness and antisocial behaviour be curbed? Will thieves and other predators looking for easy victims be deterred? Deal with those issues, the argument goes, and more night-time economy custom will accrue. Westminster’s political case, of course, is that police budgets and public transport provision are Khan’s responsibility, not theirs.

Disagreement on both fronts is set to continue. On licensing, Westminster’s draft policy, complete with post-consultation revisions, will be considered for adoption at the next full council meeting, on 16 September. The council says those revisions will reflect a reconsideration of what it calls “its own approach to explaining and communicating licensing policy”. Expect elucidation of what terms such as “vertical drinking” and “cumulative impact” mean and more on how growth and variety in the licensed sector can best be encouraged.

The backdrop remains the government’s promised granting of “strategic” powers over licensing to the Mayor, enabling him to intervene in borough decisions, as Mayors can already over planning applications. Details about the range and reach of these strategic powers are awaited. There is grapevine talk of a further, high-profile City Hall demonstration of intent coming soon. More on that as we get it, as they say.

As for the Oxford Street plans, those will continue to irritate the council and others as the Oxford Street Development Corporation (OSDC), accountable to the Mayor, presses on with the large and demanding task of delivering the project.

It is important to keep in mind that the OSDC and TfL are different organisations with different roles, and that it is the latter, whose board is chaired by Mayor Khan, that has been irking Westminster. A recurring complaint from the latter is that TfL simply isn’t taking its worries and expertise into account. The matter of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) avoidance is brandished as a case in point.

In order to be exempt from doing EIA, a large and lengthy task, TfL had to submit what is called a “screening” request, essentially submitting that what they intend to do on Oxford Street won’t make a lot of difference to the area around it. A document of that description was sent to Rayner’s department, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) on 5 August, and TfL says Westminster was told of this. However, it wasn’t sent a copy.

There appears to have been a bit of email to-and-fro concerning the screening document contents, which looped in the office of the Mayor. TfL says that Westminster asked the MHCLG for a copy of TfL’s submission on 20 August, and was provided with it the following day. The council then provided comments to the department and wrote to the government to ask, without success, for a full EIA to be required.

The screening submission, which apparently runs to more than 500 pages, is not publicly available, but persons who have seen it say it acknowledges that there will be increased noise pollution in Fitzrovia and Marylebone and ill effects on air quality in Piccadilly. For its part, TfL insists it has been in regular discussion with Westminster ever since the project was launched two years ago.

How are things progressing with the Oxford Street scheme itself? The official line used to be that traffic would be barred from what the OSDC has dubbed the “Oxford Street West” section “by the end of this summer“. That timetable has slipped to the second half of October and the necessary “enabling works” – stuff like barriers and signage and bus stop adjustments – have only just begun.

Once those works are complete, it will be possible to start putting the elements of a temporary pedestrianised design in place. One estimate, from a sceptical source, is that the temporary scheme won’t be finished until early next year. The next meeting of the OSDC board, of which Tim Barnes is a member, is provisionally scheduled for the afternoon of 17 September. Perhaps that will make the picture clearer.

Barnes, in his letter to the amenity groups, wrote, “Our position on pedestrianisation remains simple: if it is to happen, it must be done properly.” He added: “The Council will now review the details of the Secretary of State’s [Rayner’s] decision and carefully consider our next steps.”

Social media: Bluesky, LinkedIn, X/Twitter. Photo of drinkers outside a pub in Mayfair, taken on Saturday afternoon.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack. Thanks.

 

Related