Today’s report from Create Streets and the Central District Alliance Business Improvement District looks into the tricky problem of unused, unloved, and ugly phone boxes littering our streets. The report sets out the scale of the issue and, drawing on the work of Camden and other councils, presents practical and detailed solutions to the problem.
Download the full report here.
Summary
- We no longer need many phone boxes. Calls from phone boxes have declined 99.5 per cent from 800 million minutes in 2002 to only 4 million in 2021-22 due to ubiquitous mobile phones.
- Phone boxes have not reduced as quickly as phone calls from them. From a peak of 140,000 phone boxes in the late 1990s, there are still around 15,800 across the UK, an 89 per cent decrease.
- Phone providers predominantly keep phone boxes for the advertising revenue. BT’s status as the designated Universal Service Provider obliges them to keep some phone boxes in place. However, many remaining boxes are located in areas of high footfall, in places where it would be all but impossible to obtain planning permission for a standalone advertising board. Often, phone companies are not providing telephone services. They are selling advertising. Many phone boxes are now used as free Wi-Fi hubs, allowing them to collect and sell data and provide targeted advertising.
- Box blight: over half of our phone boxes are blighting out streets. In one central London study of 64 phone boxes, four had been repurposed, 27 were in a poor state of repair externally (graffiti, missing panels, etc), 25 were not operational and of these 14 were both in a poor condition and not operational. Only half were in a good state of repair and over 40 per cent were no use to anyone. If these numbers are pro-rated across the UK’s 15,800 phone boxes, it implies that around 9,300 are suffering from ‘box blight.’
- Councils are struggling to cope with box blight. Local authorities believe that they have limited legal ability to tackle the problem. There is no widely used legal mechanism by which councils can request removal of a phone box, so it often comes down to informal negotiation. It has been reported to us that phone companies will request a fee of between £30,000 and £50,000 for removal, based on the lost revenue from advertising, Wi-Fi and perhaps calls.
- The first generation of phone boxes has completely disappeared. No street furniture has a perennial right to exist if it serves no public purpose, or does not please the people and dignify their streets, as shown by the pre-history of the phone boxes. The Postmaster General first authorised phone boxes in 1884. By 1907 there were about 7,800, mainly cheap wooden sentry boxes. Unloved by the public 100 years ago, none survive in situ. All have vanished.
- Surviving classic red phone boxes are often in better condition but some need love and a new lease of life. We estimate that 9,500 historic red phone boxes remain. Around 3,500 phone boxes have been protected via Listing. Around 3,500 have been repurposed, leaving 6,000 as phone boxes. For Listed phone boxes, the change of use requires planning permission. This is not always easy to obtain, resulting in phone boxes that have no viable function and with no option to be removed. Some of these are visibly decaying. Beautiful historic red phone boxes can suffer from box blight as well, though will normally require a different response.
- The current regulatory framework is not solving box blight. The legal framework under which phone boxes have been installed since the 1920s has changed over time and is very complex, as are the options available to councils to remove telephone boxes which are blighting our streets. Councils do have some powers (and more than they realise) but they do not apply to many phone boxes, and many are hedged about with complexities of process and cost. It is hardly surprising that many councils are not even using the powers that they do have.
- How to banish box blight? In order to resolve this problem, this paper sets out in detail the existing legal options and process for removing telephone boxes in order to help share best practice and makes six specific recommendations to banish box blight. In our judgement these would substantively ‘solve’ the problem of box blight.
- Recommendation one: councils with the problem of ‘box blight’ should set much more ambitious targets to remove modern KX or more recent phone boxes using the mechanisms set out in chapter four of the report. At present, this will predominantly help with phone boxes installed between 1995 and 2019.
- Recommendation two: the government, a national body such as the Local Government Association or a regional body such as the Greater London Authority or London Councils, should actively promote the use of the existing powers that councils have by publishing authoritative but accessible guidance with case studies on how to remove box blight. At present, this will predominantly help with phone boxes installed between 1995 and 2019.
- Recommendation three: the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) should amend the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to make it easier to remove problematic phone boxes installed since 1984 as described in detail in the full report.
- Recommendation four: MHCLG should improve the ease of change of use and Listed building consent for remaining historic phone boxes installed before 1984 by creating a new permitted development class and using a new national Listed Building Consent Order as described in detail in the full report.
- Recommendation five: Historic England should improve the protection for remaining historic phone boxes installed before 1984 by Listing most or all of the remaining unlisted classic red telephone boxes.
- Recommendation six: MHCLG working with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, should consult on and draft new legislation to require that communication equipment is kept in a good state of repair under risk of fine, and also ensure that such equipment is rateable as set out in detail in the full report.
The chair of the Central District Alliance, Alexander Jan, commented;
“London’s pavements (and those of our fellow urban areas) are frequently littered with an array of semi-abandoned modern phone kiosks. These act as magnets for graffiti, littering, fly tipping, drug taking and worse. Councils and business improvement districts spend thousands of pounds a year dealing with them. Outrageously, the only value they typically generate is advertising revenue for their corporate owners.”
Tom Noble, Senior Urban Designer at Create Streets and report author commented:
“In the age of ubiquitous smart phones, phone boxes can no longer be considered critical urban infrastructure in all but a few circumstances. While essential and historic phone boxes are rightly protected, our city streets are littered with ugly phone boxes that are long past their sell by date. Unfortunately, the laws regulating their presence on our streets have been slow to catch up; councils simply don’t have the power to enforce removal and what limited powers they have are onerous, consuming too much time and resources. We urgently need to streamline and strengthen these processes, in this report we set out clear recommendations for how.”
Nicholas Boys Smith, founding chair of Create Streets commented:
“Box blight is a menace hiding in plain sight, attracting litter, cluttering up our pavements and making all our streets and square a little bit uglier and less pleasant. We don’t have to put with this and we shouldn’t. Other countries don’t. Our paper sets out practical steps that the new government can take now to make our streets and town centres better and more prosperous.”
Read more about our report in The Guardian here.
Listen to Nicholas Boys Smith on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight (19/07/24) here at 28’10” and below
Download the full report here.