// American candy shops on London’s Oxford Street return to peak levels
// A third of the stores were closed down last year following a clampdown on trading standards and legal action
The American candy stores on London’s Oxford Street have returned to peak levels, new research has suggested.
The number of American candy shops operating from Oxford Street has returned to peak levels despite a clampdown in November, according to Local Data Company (LDC).
A third of the stores were closed down as a consequence of a clampdown on trading standards and legal action, according to Westminster City Council.
The new LDC survey has found that there are now 29 candy and souvenir stores open on Oxford Street, the same number of stores as there were at their peak in 2020, Retail Week reported.
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This is despite of a series of raids ordered by Westminster City Council last year, which saw the number reduce to 21 and a huge haul of suspect and unsafe items being discovered.
The stores have been investigated for illegal activity and tax evasion, which the council estimates to be worth in the region of £8m to the taxpayer.
At the end of 2017, there were 17 of these stores on Oxford Street.
The survey by LDC found the council was increasingly playing “whack-a-mole” with these traders, and of the 12 stores closed down in November 2022, nine had been replaced by similar shops by February, and only 18% of these stores had been reoccupied by a retailer offering a different category of goods.
Westminster City Council leader Adam Hug said: “We are dealing here with a sophisticated operation that is skilled at exploiting UK legal loopholes.
“There is a glaring lack of governance around setting up companies in the UK with only cursory checks on who the directors are – there are more checks involved if you want to get a local authority library lending card.
“We need the new Economic Crime Bill to help clamp down on these loopholes and to provide government agencies such as Companies House and HMRC with the powers and funding they need.”
