Evidencing housing requirements

Helping clients to understand the future demand for homes

The current reform of the planning system places new duties on local authorities to establish, objectively evidence and meet locally generated housing requirements. Local Plan Examinations and Appeals show that the required evidence and its interpretation into policy represent areas of considerable debate and challenge.

Members of the economic planning team at Turley Associates have provided housing requirement evidence across over 35 local authority areas in England and Wales. Working for the private and the public sectors, we help clients to understand the future, objectively evidenced, demand for homes to inform policy development and to support the promotion of sites through the planning process.

TArget – our housing requirement model

The economic planning team offers a housing requirement model – TArget – a scenario-based toolkit which factors in demographics, economics, affordability and policy drivers and constraints. This will provide objectively assessed projections of housing demand and need.

In line with the NPPF, the model uses the latest population and household projection datasets (produced by the ONS and DCLG respectively) as the basis for developing alternative projections of demand. We use the POPGROUP suite of software to provide variant forward looking projections - rather than trend-based projections - which take account of, for example:

To discuss how the TArget model can help you, please contact Antony Pollard, Director of Economic Planning.