Exception and rule: how the ‘Standard Method’ fails to govern England’s housing requirement

Abstract

The assessment of housing requirement has become an important feature of planning practice in many contexts. The calculative practices by which the level of housing requirement is determined represent important instruments that seek to discipline markets to produce sufficient dwellings to meet the assessed level of requirement. However, behind the purportedly objective assessment of housing requirement are assumptions that pertain to a political imperative to deliver more dwellings. In this article we seek to reveal these political principles by unpacking the ‘Standard Method’ for the assessment of housing requirement which has applied in England since February 2019. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/