What do voters in Holborn and St Pancras want?

The by-election in Holborn and St Pancras will be held on Thursday.

Voters in the constituency will be selecting a new MP to replace Sir Keir Starmer, who resigned from the House of Commons at the start of September.

There are 15 candidates in the by-election who have spent weeks speaking to potential constituents and putting leaflets through letterboxes.

What do the voters make of the contest, and what are the issues that concern them? BBC London went to Holborn and St Pancras to find out.

Laura said: "It's really impossible for families in Camden to progress. You can be, you know, in a good job doing fairly well for yourselves, but really it's hard to move beyond the flat, for example. And so I'd really like to see the candidates kind of doing what they can for local families.

"It's become impossible to even contemplate moving to a bigger place.

"I'm raising a small family in a flat and I think we have to leave the area if we want anything more than that and that doesn't seem right when you know we've established a life here and we enjoy living here but it does just feel quite unaffordable, particularly for young families."

Laura added: "I think sometimes candidates underestimate the importance of local issues and focus a bit too much on the national stuff."

Fateha said: "Cost of living, I think that's the key thing, the price of energy, there's a lot of things people are unhappy about, lack of investments. I work in adult social care, so lack of investments in that.

"People are really struggling; lack of activities for people with special needs, and I guess, you know, the continuous austerity has a knock-on effect, and going forward I think people need to have confidence."

Cyrus said: "It's an interesting one because even though it's a local by-election, it's very significant in terms of the politics of the whole country.

"I'm not actually keeping fully up to date on it all, but obviously it's like the parties trying their chances so it seems nationally quite significant, so I guess I'm gonna be thinking about that probably more than immediately local issues really."

Cyrus added: "The climate crisis is really important - our approach to that, our approach to other things going on around the planet as well.

"The conflict in the Middle East, situation in Gaza, the approaches of the parties running to these issues is really significant to me.

"We get lots of flyers through the front door about it, but I haven't fully made up my mind yet."

Amelie said: "Fixing things around the neighbourhood - I think there are a lot of issues that we face and it takes ages for anything to happen.

"Also the taxes here, like council tax, is a very important issue for me.

"[The area is] very expensive and especially like I'm like a single-income house so it's tough."

Amelie added: "I should probably look into it because I'm not too invested in like politics and stuff like that here."

She said she wanted "more community involvement for us because I've been trying to find ways as well to get involved and help around and stuff, I don't think there's that many opportunities here for that".

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