The recently appointed chief executive of the New West End Company, Dee Corsi, has set out a three-pronged plan to help boost central London’s retail and leisure economy, ahead of what she described as “a very challenging market over the next 18 months”.

She said that although pre-Christmas trading is up around 24% on last year, it remains significantly lower than pre-pandemic.

And while the opening of the Elizabeth Line is expected to contribute around 7% of additional turnover for the West End’s retailers, hotels and restaurants by 2030, Corsi would like to see the government act to provide some help for businesses in the meantime.

She said that NWEC is to lobby the government over the reintroduction of tax-free shopping for international visitors, which was briefly brought back in one budget, only to be removed in a budgetary reset.

“Reintroducing tax-free shopping for international visitors is a simple way to give retailers and the tourism sector a much-needed boost," Corsi said. "Far from costing the £2B that was previously cited, new research from Oxford Economics estimates that reintroducing the scheme would actually benefit the Treasury by £350M each year, supporting 78,000 jobs and adding £4.1B to the British economy.”

NWEC is to present the evidence and urge the Chancellor to ask the Office for Budget Responsibility to conduct an independent review of the full economic impact of tax-free shopping, she added.

In a further attempt to encourage more international tourists Corsi is leading the campaign to simplify the visa system for international visitors, noting that the West End’s visitor profile has become far more domestic than it was pre-pandemic.

She would also like to see an extension to Sunday trading hours to allow West End and Knightsbridge stores to stay open two hours later than they are allowed currently, by designating them as ‘international zones’.

Not surprisingly, Oxford Street is another key focus for NWEC, and Corsi welcomed the influx of leisure and commercial offices coming onto what has traditionally been a retail-dominated thoroughfare, but which has suffered from the loss of key retail names and department stores in recent years.

“It’s more about the experience, and we’ve got a lot of new things coming to the West End," she said. "There’s Outernet London, the Twist Museum and the Frameless Art Exhibition at Marble Arch, which are all very different types of offer and which help make the West End a destination.”