What the Mayor’s New Safer Streets Fund Tells Us About the Future of Public Lighting

It’s a London-specific scheme, run through City Hall, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, and TfL, not a national pot every council can apply to. But it’s a signal worth paying attention to well beyond London. It reflects a shift that’s been building since the introduction of the Home Office’s Safer Streets Fund in 2020: public realm safety, and specifically how well or badly a space is lit, has moved from an afterthought in council budgets to a named policy priority with its own funding line.

For those of us who work in public and commercial lighting, that shift matters. It’s an invitation to think harder about what “safe” lighting actually means, and to make the case that safety and destination-building aren’t competing priorities. Done well, they’re the same project.

Lighting as safety infrastructure, but not just floodlights

The instinct when “safety lighting” comes up is often to think of it in fairly blunt terms: brighter, harsher, more CCTV-friendly. But the evidence on what actually makes people, and specifically women, feel safer at night points somewhere more nuanced.

A few principles consistently come up in research and in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) practice:

• Continuity over intensity. A single brilliantly lit junction followed by a dark underpass is worse than a corridor of consistent, moderate light. Uneven lighting creates the “dead zones” people instinctively avoid or route around, which in turn kills footfall for anyone trying to trade there.
• Sightlines matter as much as lumens. Lighting that lets people see further ahead and be seen from a distance does more for perceived safety than raw brightness in a single spot.
• Warm, human-scale light reads as cared-for; harsh, institutional light reads as neglected. Colour temperature and fixture design carry a message about whether a place is looked after, and whether anyone’s watching.
• Layering works better than uniformity. A combination of functional path lighting, accent lighting on features or shopfronts, and landmark lighting on key buildings does more to make a space feel populated and alive than flat, even coverage.

The point is that the same design thinking that makes a street feel safe after dark is the design thinking that makes it somewhere people want to be after dark. A well-lit alley that only exists to satisfy a safety audit checkbox is a missed opportunity. A well-lit alley that also becomes a route people choose to walk, browse, or linger in, is doing double duty: for public safety, and for the evening economy that BIDs and high streets increasingly depend on.

Why this is a BID conversation, not just a council one

Business Improvement Districts sit in an interesting position here. They’re not the direct recipients of funds like London’s, but they’re often the ones commissioning public realm lighting (festive schemes, permanent architectural lighting, wayfinding) with footfall and dwell time as the primary business case.

What the Mayor’s approach suggests is that safety and destination lighting can be designed as one investment rather than two. A BID commissioning a lighting refresh for commercial reasons has an opportunity to build in the safety-audit thinking that schemes like this are formalising, consulting the people who actually walk those streets after dark, rather than assuming what “well-lit” should look like. And a council allocating safety funding has a genuine opportunity to spend it in a way that also supports the high street it sits on, rather than treating safety and vibrancy as separate budget lines.

The design principle worth borrowing: audit with the people who use the space

Perhaps the most transferable idea in the Mayor’s strategy isn’t the money; it’s the method. Rather than assuming which junctions, parks, or alleyways need attention, the scheme is built around asking women and girls directly, and using that local knowledge to shape where investment goes.

That’s a principle any council or BID can adopt regardless of budget size: before specifying a lighting scheme, walk the space at night with the people who use it. Ask where they slow down, where they choose a longer but better-lit route, where they avoid altogether. It costs nothing and it consistently surfaces problems that a desk-based audit misses.

Where this leaves us

We don’t think the answer to “how do we make streets safer” is simply “install more lights.” But we do think lighting design, done with the same care and consultation the Mayor’s strategy is asking for, is one of the most cost-effective, visible ways councils and BIDs can act on both safety and vibrancy at once.

If you’re a council or BID thinking through how to spend a safety or public realm budget in a way that does more than tick a box, we’d welcome the conversation.