An extended editorial essay examines the nature of the basic needs debate, providing a context for the discussion taken up in subsequent articles. Particular and distracting attention is usually paid in that debate to national “count‐cost‐supply” exercises—assessing physical deficits and social targets and establishing the capacity to supply and ensure service delivery. But the emphasis should be rather on the systematic study of class and other political demands and their implications for ‘basic needs’ project formulation and implementation. The complexity and contingency of the linkages between needs should re‐focus the debate on the critical process of exclusion and the structure of demands for minima. The concern with basic needs is more than a new fashionable slogan but might be more effective if access to political and administrative institutions was at the top of its agenda and the rallying cry became ‘essential guarantees’.