Needless Demand: How a focus on need can help solve the housing crisis

Needless demand: How a focus on need can help solve the housing crisis is the eighth paper in CPRE’s Housing Foresight series. It analyses the current method that councils use to plan for local housing and what is being built as a result. It finds that ‘housing need’ and ‘housing demand’ are being conflated in planning policy, with the result that numbers matter more than type and tenure of housing.

Needless Demand shows how Government could split need and demand, and so tackle the housing crisis more effectively. It calls for clearer definitions of ‘need’ and ‘demand’ to be applied to planning policy, and for councils to apply them to their housing targets and local plans.