Her father, Charles Enrique Dent CBE, was a professor of medicine of half Spanish descent, and her mother, Margaret Ruth Coad, was an Anglican vicar's daughter who converted to Catholicism to marry him.
Dent Coad stated that asking for advances for Christmas would result in people experiencing, "many future months without enough income to cover their expenses".
Dent Coad said, “I can't help thinking that poor quality materials and construction standards may have played a part in this hideous and unforgivable event.” Dent Coad links the council's intention to redevelop the area to the tragedy, she said, “The council want to develop this area full of social housing, and in order to enable that they have prettified a building that they felt was ugly ...
People want to stay near their networks where their children go to school, where their families are.”[22] Poverty in Kensington and the fire were the subjects of her maiden speech in the House of Commons on 22 June 2017.
[23] On 4 July 2017, Dent Coad said that residents had no confidence in Sir Martin Moore-Bick to lead the Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry, describing him as "a technocrat" who lacked "credibility".
[24] She supported calls for "reparations" to the community in the form of restoring local assets and services such as a college and a library which were under threat, and claims that many on the council see those in social housing as "lesser beings.
"[25] Dent Coad supported a call for the leaders of Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council to resign so that there could be fresh elections.
After the Grenfell Tower Inquiry final report was published on 4 September 2024, in which former housing secretary Eric Pickles and his government department was criticised for failing to act on a 2013 coroner recommendation to improve cladding fire safety regulations and his enthusiastic support of a programme to slash regulations which dominated department thinking, Dent Coad called for Pickles to "have the grace to resign" from the House of Lords and as an ethics adviser.
[36] On 29 June 2017, Dent Coad voted against the Labour party whip and for an amendment to the Queen's Speech calling for the UK's continued membership of the Single Market and the Customs Union following Brexit.
[41] Dent Coad remained a local councillor,[42] and Labour group leader on Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council.
"[45] In October 2022, the national Labour Party blocked Dent Coad from being on the selection longlist for the Kensington and Bayswater parliamentary seat at the next election.
[46] Dent Coad resigned from the Labour Party on 27 April 2023,[3] giving several reasons including Keir Starmer's crackdown on dissent, his reneging on pledges and the ignoring of anti-black racism, with the final straw for her was being told to remove a Facebook post criticising Starmer for taking £1,000 worth of hospitality from Mulalley & Co, a company that was ordered by the High Court to pay £10.8 million damages for providing and installing defective building cladding on a residential tower block.
[5] In September 2017, Dent Coad was the subject of press criticism for comments about Prince Harry and his role as a British Army Apache helicopter pilot which she then withdrew.
Conservative MP George Freeman said: "The re-appearance of misogyny and racial prejudice in Corbyn's Labour Party isn't a surprise".
[54] In November 2017, it emerged that Dent Coad had, in 2010, described Shaun Bailey, then a Conservative parliamentary candidate, now a London Assembly member, as a "token ghetto boy".