FOI - Oxford Street MDC consultation [Aug 2025]

Your request 

In your Oxford Street Transformation – consultation report, dated June 2025, you provided a heatmap of respondent postcodes to your Oxford Street consultation, but not a breakdown of responses by location.

In the interests of transparency, I would therefore like to request that you provide a breakdown of the number of responses from each postcode, showing for each postcode the numbers in favour of the proposals and the numbers against the proposals.

If you are unable to provide this information for each postcode, then please provide it for each outward code (i.e. the first three or four digits of the postcode denoting the geographical area).

Could you also please provide a breakdown of responses by borough, showing the numbers of those in favour of the proposals and the number of those against the proposals?

In addition, please provide the number of responses received from addresses or postcodes within a one-mile radius of Oxford Street, showing the numbers of those in favour of the proposals and the number of those against the proposals.

If you are unable to provide any of this information, then please provide the source data for the heatmap in Figure 2.4 of your consultation report, suitably anonymised for GDPR purposes. 

Our response

The consultation was undertaken by Transport for London (TfL) on behalf of the GLA. TfL subcontracted AECOM to undertake all analysis for the consultation, including a sentiment analysis. This analysis was not performed against postcode. Survey respondents were asked to provide a postcode to help assess the reach of the consultation across London. This is shown in a map in section 2.4 of the consultation report.

Postcode data is often not available for responses received by email, which accounted for 26 per cent of all the responses received. (Note: 6,642 responses were received in total and, of these, 1,761 were emails including those identified as being part of a campaign).

Removing boilerplate campaign response emails, which were not counted toward sentiment analysis, this amounts to 22 percent of all responses that often do not contain postcodes, and therefore this data was not extracted during analysis.

Note that in addition to those who replied by email, some who responded via online form also chose not to provide a postcode. This totals to 40 per cent of all respondents where a postcode was not provided.

For this reason, utilising postcode data would not be a reliable way to analyse themes at a local geographic level, and is therefore not a useful exercise for this consultation.

The approach taken in the analysis of responses to the open questions in this consultation, including analysis of overall sentiment, was to assess the totality of views about the establishment of a Mayoral Development Corporation and the principal of pedestrianisation across all respondents.

Because sentiment analysis was not conducted against postcode data, as postcodes were not available for a significant portion of the responses, we are therefore unable to provide an analysis of sentiment by postcode as you have requested. Undertaking this analysis for the responses where postcode is available would require us contracting the services of AECOM who performed the sentiment analysis to create a report for you.

In accordance with ICO guidance, FOIA only applies to information that a public authority already holds in recorded form at the time of a request: Determining whether we hold information | ICO

If you don’t hold a particular piece of information that someone has asked for, you don’t have to create it. Nor are you required to ask a third party for the information, unless they hold it on your behalf.

The source data for the heatmap in Figure 2.4 is attached. It has been redacted to only include the outward code, for GDPR purposes. Please note that this only represents a portion of consultation responses as explained above.