A FORMER BHS store has moved closer to being revamped after a bank proposed using its first floor as office space.

The Queen Street shop was finally closed in March this year after staff were told 12 months earlier that the store would shut.

Lloyds Banking Group wants to use the first floor – formerly BHS’s men’s department and a cafe – to house staff working for Royal Bank of Scotland, which it owns.

The ground floor is to be split between a new branch of Halifax – which is planning to move from the Westgate Centre – and a branch of Topshop and Topman.

Halifax spokesman Shelley Dickinson said no likely date had yet been set for the move, but she said there would be no job losses Planning agent RR Planning said it had spoken informally with Oxford City Council staff who had said there was an “acute demand” for office space in the city centre.

In its application to the council, an agent for the firm said: “The existing Halifax bank at Westgate, which employs 19 people, will shortly relocate to the ground floor of the property.

“It is my client’s intention to sub-let the first floor of the property for office use.”

Access to the offices would be via St Ebbe’s Street.

Topshop and Topman, which is owned by the same firm as BHS – Arcadia – has already made successful applications to the city council to change the shop’s Queen Street frontage.

Arcadia did not respond to a request asking if it planned to close the existing Topshop store further up Queen Street.

Halifax used to have a branch in the Westgate Centre, next to the entrance to the Central Library, but it closed in advance of the £440m redevelopment and extension of the shopping centre, now under construction.

It has temporarily moved to a smaller unit near Sainsbury’s, ahead of its move to the BHS site.

The bank has traded from the Westgate since 1972.

The moves come after reports of the so-called “Westgate effect”, where national high street chains prepare to take shop units in the new Westgate Centre, leaving empty shops behind.

In April, the Oxford Mail found 19 premises were empty. But city centre manager Laurie-Jane Taylor said figures for the city were well below the national average.