How Labour Put Big Property Above Camden’s Local Residents

A little more than a week before Thursday’s crucial byelection in the London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, prime minister Andy Burnham laid out a radical social and economic programme at Labour’s party conference in Liverpool. If the ideas were big, the shift in Labour’s direction was even bigger. Words not heard in years peppered the speech: the working class, public control, and apologies for political failures. Beginning with a curt acknowledgement that former prime minister Keir Starmer won a general election he could hardly lose, Burnham spent the rest of his speech slamming the door on Starmerism. 

Not in Holborn and St Pancras, though, Starmer’s old parliamentary seat.

Labour’s candidate in the byelection, Sagal Abdi-Wali, has been a fixture of Camden council (the London borough in which the constituency falls) since the 2022 local elections. She quickly rose to prominence, appointed cabinet member for the council’s Better Homes programme in 2024, before being voted council leader in May this year.

But sources close to Camden council have described it as a stronghold of the Labour right. Characterised by purges of dissenters, cosiness to corporate interests and a lack of vision, the Labour group running the council, Novara Media was told, is ground-zero for Starmerism. 

That empty philosophy is epitomised in the council’s approach to housing, a topic – especially in the form of social housing – at the heart of Burnham’s national plans. While the new prime minister has promised a generational transformation in building council home capacity, Camden council has repeatedly sided with wealthy corporate developers when they’ve requested massive cuts to promised affordable and social housing allotments in new developments. Described as a “weak touch” by one source, another was more blunt: “They are fucking aroused by private developers.”

One example is the redevelopment of the O2 centre on north-west London’s Finchley Road. The three-phase plans, drawn up by Landsec, Britain’s largest commercial property developer, were originally approved by the council in 2023. Involving the demolition of an existing shopping centre, cinema and leisure centre, Landsec promised that 570 of the 1,796 new flats would be a mix of social and affordable housing. At a meeting last month, Camden council approved an enormous reduction: now, just 330 flats will meet those criteria, a drop from 32% to 18%. In the first phase of the construction, the slash has been even deeper, with barely 15% of the total being classed as affordable. (A council spokesperson told Novara Media that the permission granted includes 20% affordable housing across the whole site, and that the development also supports the delivery of other community benefits, including funding for step-free access at West Hampstead Station.)

If the prime minister is to be believed, neoliberalism is on its way out of Burnham’s Britain. But in Camden, it appears in rosy health.

In the O2 centre case, Landsec took advantage of a Starmerite innovation. In October last year, then-housing secretary and self-proclaimed Starmer-loyalist Steve Reed (since returned to the backbenches) announced a two-year window in which developers who promised a 20%, rather than the previous 35%, affordable housing quota would have their plans fast-tracked. This didn’t require Camden to accept Landsec’s changes. But the council rolled over anyway. 

The council’s approach to private development has also raised questions over future social housing. Approved in January, the Camley Street development near King’s Cross currently promises 401 new homes of which almost half will be for social rents. History suggests this too may be revised downwards before the first completions – and several longstanding businesses have already been forced out, they say without council support (the council denied this). In the constituency’s northern-most area, the Labour stronghold of Kentish Town, residents were perturbed by the permission granted for the construction of a £1bn Film Quarter. Promising 11 purpose-built sound stages, production suites and workspaces, developer Yoo Capital has also committed to 243 affordable homes – 50% of the sites’ planned 485 flats. Asked in a recent profile whether the developer could be trusted not to slash those figures, Abdi-Wali refused to consider that highly-plausible possibility. “I don’t want to talk like that,” she said. “We’re in a place now where it’s 50% affordable housing – secured. We want to make sure they do that. Having conversations about ‘what if they do this or that’ isn’t helpful.”

Affordable housing means rents capped at 80% of market value – a price still out of reach for most in a borough where the average monthly private rent is over £2,800. What matters in Holborn and St Pancras (and apparently to Burnham too) are secure social rents. Camden’s council’s housing waiting list now stands at over 8,000 individuals and families desperate for homes in an already densely populated borough. The National Housing Federation has said that, at current rates, it would take 82 years to clear the backlog. A baby born today might be more likely to find herself in a casket, having expired from old age, before being housed in Camden. And yet in 2025-26, the borough completed just 56 social rent homes, amongst the lowest number in London.

Growing Camden’s housing stock is funded through the council’s Community Investment Programme (CIP), a £2.3bn fund that claims to have delivered 1,780 new homes, 70% of them affordable, since CIP’s inception in 2010. Just 677 homes for social rent have been completed. That figure, however, doesn’t take into account reductions in the borough’s social housing stock through demolition. When subtracted, that figure could easily halve. Take, for example, a contested development at One Museum Street in Holborn, approved in 2023. That plan promised just 11 social rents out of 44 new homes (and space for 1,600 office workers). But to make way for it, councillors at the time reported that 26 “perfectly sound homes” would be destroyed – having been allowed to go to ruin. Not a social housing record to boast about, and yet Abdi-Wali was doing just that last week with housing secretary Angela Rayner.

Camden’s housing shortages – the result of a decade and half, some might argue, of mismanagement by the Labour-led council – could be having very real social effects. The borough is depopulating. In 2025, Camden’s population shrank by 1.8%, the largest decrease of any area in England and Wales apart from the Isles of Scilly. Since 2019, 30% fewer children have been born in Camden. And of the children who do live in the borough, around 40% live in poverty after housing costs.

Those lucky enough to have a council home in Camden may also be unlucky enough to have to deal with its repairs service. In November 2024, six months after Abdi-Wali took responsibility for Camden’s housing stock, the independent housing ombudsman released a damning report on her department. It found maladministration in 90% of complaints involving repairs (the national average is 73%). The scope of the report was, however, long, covering complaints raised by tenants from before Abdi-Wali’s cabinet position. While in post, Abdi-Wali reduced the repairs backlog from over 10,000 to 5,600, though, still under her tenure, it grew once more in 2025. 

Still, issues abound. Novara Media has been told of unchecked cases of black mould, damp, and intermittent heating. Elderly and arthritic tenants have been left in the cold, their heaters torn off the walls by cowboy contractors. In May last year, after a 15-year stint, Labour councillor Awale Olad resigned his position. In addition to standing alone on Gaza in the party’s group, he blamed the overwhelming neglect of tenants’ repairs for his departure. “I find myself engaged in a sort of tragic farce,” he wrote, “endlessly pursuing the same missed repair appointments, often dealing with miserable residents at the end of their tether.” At one point, he added, “I wrote to a senior officer that ‘I was losing the will to live’.”

A source close to the council told Novara Media that the state of affairs is due to a lack of ideas, commitment and enthusiasm for making lives better amongst the Labour group. And certainly, previous Labour councillors appear to have had their eyes on a different prize: parliament. 

The 2024 general election saw three recent councillors elevated from the then-prime minister’s seat to parliament. Georgia Gould, daughter of Tony Blair adviser Philip Gould and who’s reported to count Alastair Campbell as her mentor, was handed the Labour-stronghold of Queen’s Park and Maida Vale. Lloyd Hatton, who served just two years as a councillor before being selected by Labour in South Dorset, won by barely 1,000 votes. Finally, there’s Danny Beales. Elected a Camden councillor in 2014, Beales was selected to fight for Boris Johnson’s recently-resigned Uxbridge and South Ruislip in a late 2022 by-election. He lost, but won it for Starmer’s Labour in 2024 with the slightest margin: a little under 600 seats.

The Labour council, it’s said, has for years adopted what’s been called Camden’s “north sea oil” approach to development. According to that strategy, Camden should leverage the wealth of its land via corporate developers in order to plug the holes in its budget. Drill, baby, drill – except it’s not spurts of oil rising into the sky, but blocks of glass and steel encasing foreign-owned luxury flats (thought to be worth several billions in Camden alone). 

That north sea oil approach is often blamed for Camden Labour’s neglect of its housing stock. Speaking at an event organised by then-London Assembly member Zoë Garbett (now Green mayor for Hackney) in February this year, one Camden council home resident said: “The land under our homes is viewed as an asset too valuable for working-class people to live on.” A source close to Camden council concurred, accusing the leadership of allowing homes to go into disrepair, neglecting them to the point of irreparability, then taking the opportunity to sell. 

Private home owners in Camden have also struggled to get help from the borough’s Labour figures when things go wrong. In 2019, a seven-flat new build was completed at 53 Agar Grove in Camden Town. Dan Bruce bought his first home in the block, telling Novara Media he was “dead excited” to have the keys to a place of his own. But within days of moving in, water began to enter the apartment from its terrace. The excavation that followed revealed further shoddiness: structural cracking in the brickwork. 

There began, for Bruce and two of his neighbours, an almost decade-long process of trying to get justice from the developers and the insurers, while fearing the potentially imminent collapse of the building. After a period in which it looked like then-MP Starmer might come to the rescue, nothing happened. Abdi-Wali, in her earlier role as Camden council’s housing lead, also did not reply to Bruce’s letters. And when Bruce tried to organise a housing hustings ahead of this week’s byelection, the Labour candidate declined an invitation to attend.

Bruce, following the dream, paid his life savings for a flat that may well be worthless. Others, less fortunate, depend, if they’re lucky, on Camden council for a roof over their heads. Those even worse off languish on a list it’ll take a generation to clear. Meanwhile, corporations have grown richer on human misery and hope in this borough. Not all of that is Sagal Abdi-Wali’s individual fault. But neither, Novara was told, has she used her powers to move the dial. 

Asked for comment on Novara Media’s findings, a Camden council spokesperson said: “We want all our residents to be safe and feel safe in their homes. 

“Over the past year, we have resolved more than 6,000 damp and mould cases and responded to 100% of emergency cases within 24 hours. We have robust compliance regimes and are working to ensure all aspects of our council homes are frequently checked so they are as safe as possible. 

“We have built 1,780 new homes so far – 70% of these are affordable and this includes 677 homes at social rent, in addition to intermediate rent homes, assisted living, sheltered housing and temporary housing. The council is also buying back former social housing and changing properties originally intended for private sale into affordable homes where possible. We are building larger and high-quality homes to address overcrowding.”

A Labour spokesperson said: “London has acutely felt the long-term consequences of a national housing crisis. Local authorities including Camden had their budgets slashed by the previous Tory government, forcing them away from preventing homelessness and into crisis management mode. 

“From 2010-2023 the Conservative government cut Camden’s budget by around £200m, along with reducing other public sector budgets, resulting in increasing numbers of people seeking help.

“As a councillor, Sagal Abdi-Wali secured £670m to improve social housing. She also supports the Camley Street brownfield regeneration project, which will deliver 401 new homes where there were previously none, and nearly half will be genuinely affordable. These homes will be made available as social rents for families on Camden’s housing register, and at intermediate rents for key workers. 

“We know there is lots of work to be done, and that Camden needs more homes. As a local champion working with a Labour government, Sagal is best-placed to deliver on that need.”