A former Labour MP has publicly backed Green Party leader Zack Polanski in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, putting housing policy at the centre of the contest in its final days. Emma Dent Coad, who represented Kensington in west London, is featured in Green campaign leaflets urging voters to support Polanski. The poll is scheduled for Thursday 8 October.
Dent Coad is not a member of the Green Party. Her intervention is notable because she frames her support around renters, people seeking genuinely affordable homes and leaseholders facing building-safety or other housing problems. She says the constituency needs an MP able to push for substantial legislative change as well as speak up for people who encounter those failures in practice.
“Holborn and St Pancras needs an MP who understands that the current housing model has failed those who need genuinely affordable homes, and who will support leaseholders battling an archaic system that disadvantages and silences them,” Dent Coad said.
She also argues that simply administering an inadequate system is not enough. Her support is personal rather than an endorsement from a former Labour organisation: Dent Coad left Labour in 2023, after representing Kensington, and says she has known Polanski for years. She describes her own experience as a housing activist and councillor as part of the reason she believes he understands the issue.
Housing is a local pressure point
The endorsement lands in a constituency where housing is not an abstract national campaign theme. Camden recorded 8,380 households on its social-housing waiting list in March 2025, 9.5 per cent more than a year earlier. The figure is a dated snapshot, not a count of homes that could immediately be offered: applicants differ in household size and need, while the supply of suitable properties is limited.
Camden’s current housing-register guidance describes more than 7,600 households as looking for a home and says fewer than three per cent of homes become available for letting in a year. Its figures are published on different pages and at different times, so they should not be treated as a like-for-like measure. Together, they underline the scale of demand that sits behind local arguments about affordability and housing supply.
Dent Coad’s campaign message also raises concerns about construction quality, fire and building safety, and the pace of new housing. Those are her political criticisms, not findings made by this endorsement. She says the constituency needs representation that can combine scrutiny of those problems with pressure for changes in law.
The Labour candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, is Camden’s council leader. Before becoming leader, she was responsible for the council’s housing brief. Dent Coad points to that record as part of her case for change. Abdi-Wali has previously said she was working to turn performance around while she held the housing portfolio. The disagreement is therefore about more than which party should represent the constituency: it also puts competing assessments of a council service into a parliamentary campaign.
The distinction matters. Voters in this by-election will choose an MP for Holborn and St Pancras; they will not directly elect Camden’s housing department or decide the council’s next budget. A successful MP can raise local cases, question ministers and press for national housing legislation, but the council remains responsible for its own services under the powers it has.
Dent Coad’s endorsement adds a specific voice to the closing campaign debate, rather than evidence of a wider shift in voter opinion. It establishes that a former Labour MP who made housing a prominent part of her public work is asking constituents to support Polanski. It does not show how many voters share that view, and no result can be inferred from a leaflet or a single endorsement.
With polling day only days away, the exchange sharpens a practical question for residents: which candidate is most likely to represent people affected by high housing demand, poor conditions or insecurity, and what can an MP realistically change? The answer will be decided at the ballot box on 8 October. Until then, the housing claims remain part of the campaign argument, not a verdict on the candidates’ performance or a settled account of every housing problem in the borough.
