SHOPPERS at the £440m new Westgate Centre will have to carry on battling with buses for at least the next six months, council bosses have warned.

Oxfordshire County Council, which wants to ban all traffic from the busy pedestrian area of Queen Street, has today said a formal traffic survey which could enable the ban to happen, will not even start until February at the earliest.

The hold-up is the latest in a series of frustrating delays for the county and Oxford City Council which has called the situation in Queen Street, where thousands of pedestrians share the space with frequent buses, dangerous.

The two authorities announced plans to close the road to all buses last year, but that plan was derailed when Oxford Bus Company and Stagecoach Oxfordshire appealed to the government.

Transport secretary Chris Grayling has now said that, following the opening of the new Westgate Centre, 29 buses are allowed down Queen Street per hour as opposed to the 55 allowed before, and said the survey must be carried out before a ban could be enforced.

County spokesman Paul Smith explained that survey could not be carried out until 'normal' pedestrian conditions resumed on Queen Street - specifically when the centre is more full of shops, and after the Christmas rush and January sales.

He went on: "We need to have some discussion with Westgate, the city council and the bus operators about the timing and content of the monitoring. We don’t want to get into a position where we are arguing over the validity of the baseline data as that won’t help move the Queen Street debate forward.

"It is doubtful we will be doing any formal monitoring before at least February 2018. So buses are likely to be there for at least another six months, even before any revised request is re-submitted to DfT."