This article is developed from an article and interview on Clapham Junction Insider, published on 2 May 2026. We encourage readers to read the original interview in full. We approached Cllr Dikerdem with specific questions. He did not respond.
Two days before polling, the man who has run housing in Wandsworth for the past four years sat down at the Battersea Arts Centre for an hour-long interview with local outlet, Clapham Junction Insider. It is the most candid public account of his record he has given.
Some of what he told CJI is honest and reflective. Much of it cannot be reconciled with the council’s own documents.
Cllr Dikerdem has run the borough’s housing crisis. He is asking voters to put him back in charge of it. Here is what he said, and what the records show.
The Aydin Dikerdem who emerges from the CJI interview is a politician genuinely steeped in his brief. He grew up in Wandsworth. He talks about Falcon Road Bridge (a piece of local infrastructure he says he has wanted to see improved for years) with the easy familiarity of someone who actually walks past it.
He talks with feeling about what it is like to be a Muslim councillor in the current political climate, about hostility on the doorstep when people sometimes say things not knowing he is Muslim, and about why local government still matters when national politics turns ugly. He talks about the casework (a family moving into a new home, a private renter who finally won a 12-month rent repayment order after a year of mistreatment by an unlicensed landlord) as the part of the job that keeps him going.
Asked what was most difficult about the past four years, he names the regulator’s C3 verdict on the council’s housing department: a finding of serious failings requiring substantial improvement, published in February 2025. He does not deny the result. He frames it as inheriting “a 44-year-old machine” that he is “in the process of transforming.”
“I think it’s probably the most rewarding job in the world,” he tells CJI. By the end of the hour, you understand why he means it.
What he gets right
Some of what Cllr Dikerdem said checks out cleanly against the documents.
The figures he gives for the scale of Wandsworth’s housing crisis (over 10,000 households on waiting lists, more than 4,500 of them in temporary accommodation) match the council’s own most recent Cabinet paper on its housing finances, almost word-for-word. The figures he gives for the council’s housing stock (around 32,000 properties, of which 17,000 are tenanted by social rent residents) match the council’s own statement to its tenants on the regulator finding.
That regulator finding is the C3 verdict, the second-lowest grade the Regulator of Social Housing can issue, published in February 2025 with findings of serious failings requiring substantial improvement. It is the lowest assessment the Wandsworth’s housing department has ever received. Cllr Dikerdem does not contest it (at least not this time). He says, to CJI’s editor Cyril Richert that it was the most difficult thing of his four years in the job. That admission, on tape, is closer to genuine accountability than the council’s official communications about the result, which framed it largely as the consequence of decisions taken before Labour took office.
He is also candid, in places, about the scale of what has not been fixed. The Homelessness Hub (the pop-in centre for rough sleepers his administration opened in 2024 after a bruising consultation row) has, he tells CJI, helped nine people through to accommodation. He acknowledges the figure is small. CJI’s reporting puts the Hub’s running utilisation at well below capacity.
These moments matter. They show readers that on some points, this is a Cabinet Member willing to tell the truth even when it is uncomfortable. It is what makes the rest of the interview harder to read.
The pattern
Watch where the credit goes, and where the blame lands.
Asked about delivery of the Homes for Wandsworth programme, he tells CJI that “all our schemes are inherited from the Conservatives.” That is true in part. But the £24.5 million the council paid Taylor Wimpey to exit the Winstanley regeneration in December 2024 (which his department still refuses to provide information on), and the £81.8 million it has just borrowed to build on private land at Battersea Power Station, are decisions of his administration, not inheritances.
Asked about the council tax “freeze” framing that the UK Statistics Authority publicly criticised in March 2026, he tells CJI that “not one newspaper, journalist, or resident” had ever raised concerns about it. It’s true that the Conservative used the same framing. But they didn’t repeat the claim at every opportunity, make videos about it, and put it on a bright pink card sent to it every house in Wandsworth. CJI also notes that it did in fact flag the framing in the Conservative era.
Asked about the Local Plan Partial Review (the council’s flagship attempt to push the affordable housing threshold from 35% to 45%) he tells CJI that the inspector “gave us nine out of ten things we asked for.” The inspector’s report recommended non-adoption of the plan as submitted, required 21 mandatory modifications, and concluded the council’s flagship policy would be counterproductive.
It is the same shape each time. Where things have gone well, he was the agent. Where they have gone badly, the cause is elsewhere.
Where the case doesn’t hold
Then there are the substantive untruths.
He tells CJI: “We’ve now built 500 brand-new council homes.” The council’s own Authority Monitoring Report records 366 built or started under the programme. The national statistical return records 90 net additions over Labour’s term, and 70 of those are LAHF-funded acquisitions of existing properties, not new builds. The 2024/25 capital outturn records a £10.387 million underspend on the new build programme.
He tells CJI the cost per unit is “falling drastically.” The council’s most recent council-built scheme (the Platt Estate, near the river in Putney) cost £489,000 per unit to deliver. The market rate for an equivalent new home is £385,000 to £470,000.
He tells CJI that council tax is “a very small proportion” of the council’s budget. It is 32% of the council’s service revenue, as CJI’s own interviewer noted in a footnote to the published piece. The same Budget Paper projects council tax rising 86% by 2029/30 under the unlimited flexibility powers granted to Wandsworth in December 2025. For a Cabinet Member who, in September 2025, told his own colleagues that “it doesn’t make sense to sit on reserves” while his department was £15.7 million overspent, the pattern is consistent: other people’s money is discussed loosely, and the numbers are supplied only when they flatter.
He tells CJI that selective licensing is currently in “Tooting Broadway” and is being extended to “East Putney and Northcote.” The council’s own December 2025 press release confirms the existing scheme covers four wards (Furzedown, South Balham, Tooting Bec, and Tooting Broadway) and that the April 2026 extension brings in three wards, not two: East Putney, West Putney, and Northcote. Voters in West Putney, following along, were not told their ward was part of his department’s flagship private renter policy.
CJI’s editor flagged some of these in real time, with footnotes embedded in the published interview. The full set, with all sources and reasoning, is below.
His engagement record
Cllr Dikerdem has not given Putney.news the same opportunity he gave CJI.
In December 2025 we put detailed questions to him about Kimpton House leaseholders facing 400% cost increases on a fire safety project. He did not respond. In November 2025 we put questions to him about 299 outstanding fire safety actions in council properties, a number from the council’s own external audit. He did not respond. In October 2025 we put questions to him about the council’s successful Court of Appeal eviction of an autistic resident on a procedural technicality. He did not respond. In November 2025 we put questions to him about the Fownes Street anti-social behaviour case, which played out months after his own June 2025 public commitment to reform. He did not respond. When he has responded, it has come in the form of personal abuse.
Polling day is Thursday. Cllr Dikerdem is asking voters to return him to the Cabinet for a second term. The CJI interview was his hour to make his case. The graphic above tracks the claims he made, and what the documents show. Read the interview. Read the documents. Decide.
