Ewan Cameron, the Conservative Party candidate in Holborn and St Pancras

THE Tories will put housing at the centre of their Holborn and St Pancras campaign – arguing Labour’s policies have driven families out of the borough.

Ewan Cameron, a former Conservative councillor selected to stand on Monday night, also wants scrutiny on the state of the borough’s council housing – the department Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali was in charge of for the past two years.

“She was the cabinet member for ‘better homes’ – you couldn’t make it up,” he said.

“It’s deplorable with regard to the quality of council housing – and even when they do new stuff, like at Agar Grove, when I speak to residents they talk about having a new estate but it’s not been finished well and the tenants are upset. They say Camden is the landlord but they give us a deaf ear.”

While all of Camden Council’s departments are rated “outstanding” in local government inspections, housing has been the subject of damning criticism around repairs by the Ombudsman with sharp demands for improvement.

Mr Cameron blamed London Mayor Sir Lord Sadiq Khan for allowing too many student flats and studios in new developments – when places like Camden were desperate for family housing.

“Sadiq Khan sits in City Hall and what he does is he counts up a spreadsheet of dwellings,” he said. “He sets a target for each borough and he says ‘I want X number of dwellings to hit my housing target’.The reality is there’s a universe between a dwelling and a house. A house is somewhere you can call home.”

Mr Cameron said the closure of primary schools was a key indicator of the lack of family homes, and accused the Labour government of creating market conditions which left developers wary.

“If you cannot build an economy from a regulator and tax perspective that enables people to build houses – do you know what’s going to happen? They won’t build houses,” he said. The Conservatives were a distant fourth in Holborn and St Pancras last time, but Mr Cameron said the contest was a new chance for debate and a “challenge of ideas”.

Labour ‘showboats support for minorities’

CONSERVATIVE candidate Ewan Cameron became a bête noire for the Labour councillors last year when he accused the Town Hall of “showboating their support for minorities – as opposed to doing the hard work that would actually improve the lives of Camden residents”.

The quote which left the Labour leadership fuming was published by the Daily Telegraph in relation to a story about “free haircuts” and football coaching for asylum seekers under the council’s borough of sanctuary programme.

Mr Cameron told the New Journal this week: “We can all talk about foreign policy, we can all talk about the needs of a specific minority, but the fundamentals when you look across Holborn and St Pancras are the cost of living, housing and safety on our streets.”

He added: “I think the reality is that an MP should represent all and it’s important that we deal with the big issues, and it doesn’t matter what race, religion, what faith, what background you come from. My worry with this showboating is it’s all about, ‘oh we’ve done this’ or ‘we’ve identified this problem here’, and all they want is to get praise for raising the issue – rather than actually fixing the issue.”