Westminster in crackdown on sweet and souvenir shops on Oxford Street amid claims of £8m rates evasion

Westminster City Council’s latest crackdown on mixed sweet and souvenir retailers in London’s Oxford Street has netted 14,000 unsafe or illegal items, council leader Adam Hug has said.

The council has been taking action against what Cllr Hug called “a rash of mixed sweet and souvenir shops which sprung up on Oxford Street during lockdown [and] have by general consent dragged the tone of the area down as well as in some cases opening flouting trading standards laws”.

He said business rates evasion by these shops amounted to £8m and there had also been fraud against the public.

Action by the council had seen the number of such shops on the 1.2 miles shopping street fall from 30 to 21 “as a combination of trading standards and legal action starts to bite”, he said.

Westminster has in recent weeks wound up three shop operations for non-payment of business rates, and been paid £250,000 in arrears by two other companies to avoid court action.

Cllr Hug said: “Our most recent raid recovered 14,000 suspect items from just two shops on Oxford Street - the largest haul we have ever seen in one operation.”

The council said last month its haul had included 8,069 disposable vapes suspected to contain nicotine tank sizes above the permitted level, and various products unauthorised by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

There were also 256 toys that breached warning or safety labelling guidelines, 3,534 suspected counterfeit mobile phone covers and 826 jewellery rings suspected to be counterfeit or that breached the Hallmark Act.

The council said some shops had opaque ownership structures which allowed them to spring up and close without being accountable.

It said: “We want to see HMRC and the National Crime Agency get the resources they need and have pressed for this in the Economic Crime Bill.

'We also need to see urgent reform of Companies House as it is all too easy at present to set up a company with very little detail on who is really running them - something which allow unscrupulous operators to flourish.”

Westminster is also seeking to improve the general environment and public realm of the street.

Mark Smulian