…As New Zealand housing crisis shows just 47 ‘affordable’ homes built in six months***

Britons have become angrier since the referendum to leave the EU, according to a survey which suggests there is widespread unhappiness about the direction in which the country is heading.

Sixty-nine per cent of respondents said they felt their fellow citizens had become “angrier about politics and society” since the Brexit vote in 2016, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, a long-established, annual survey of trust carried out across the globe.

Forty per cent of people think others are now more likely to take part in violent protests, the UK results from the survey show, even though violent political protest in Britain is rare.

One person in six said they had fallen out with friends or relatives over the vote to leave the bloc, the survey found.

Edelman, which said the findings exposed a “disUnited Kingdom”, found widespread concern about where the government was heading, particularly among those who voted remain, and those who backed Labour.

Overall, about 65% of Britons think the country is “on the wrong track”, the survey suggests. Amongst remain voters the figure is 82%, but even among leave voters the figure is 43%.

Some 60% of people who identify with the Conservatives think the country is heading in the right direction, but among Labour identifiers, the figure is just 20%.

According to Edelman, which conducted online interviews with more than 2,000 people in the UK between December 18 and January 7, the results show “party politics is clearly failing many Britons”. Just over a third of respondents overall (35%) said they trusted Theresa May to do what was right, and just over a quarter (26%) said the same about Jeremy Corbyn.

Both May and Corbyn have seen their trust ratings among their supporters fall considerably over the past year. May’s ratings among Conservative supporters were down 10 points, to 68%, and Corbyn’s among Labour supporters were down 12 points, to 56%.

Some 72% of respondents said they thought life in Britain was unfair, 68% said they wanted to see change, and 53% said they thought the socio-political system was failing them.

The survey found 61% of all respondents said their views were not being represented in British politics. The figures were similar for those voting leave and remain, but those leaning to Labour (66%) said they were more likely to feel unrepresented than those leaning to the Conservatives (43%).

Despite the gloom, the survey also found that 35% of people said they were reading, watching or listening to more news than before, and the proportion of people who said they were sharing news stories online jumped from 41% to 63%.

Commenting on the findings, Edelman’s UK and Ireland chief executive, Ed Williams, said: “We are a disunited kingdom – a country that is seen as increasingly unfair, less tolerant and headed in the wrong direction. Brexit has exposed fractures that have split families and divided friends, made us meaner and angrier as a society, and stoked fears of violent protest and civil disorder.”

In the meantime, Jacinda Ardern’s flagship housing policy is in dire straits after the government admitted it won’t meet its target of building 1,000 affordable homes in its first year – and is set to fall short by 700.

New Zealand house prices are among the most unaffordable in the world, with Auckland the seventh most expensive city to buy a home, and all three major cities considered “severely unaffordable” by the latest Demographia international housing affordability survey.

In 2018 the Labour coalition government banned the sale of existing New Zealand homes to overseas buyers and launched its flagship KiwiBuild scheme; aiming to build 100,000 affordable homes in 10 years, with 1,000 of them scheduled for the first year.

But since July just 47 KiwiBuild homes have been completed – and housing minister Phil Twyford has said the government is unlikely to reach its target of 1,000 by June 2019 – putting the success of the project in jeopardy.

Last week the chief executive of KiwiBuild resigned following an employment dispute, in another blow for the scheme.

“In the first six months of the KiwiBuild programme it’s been tougher than expected to get the early numbers up … I think it’s going to be tough to meet that target,” Twyford told Radio NZ.

Twyford said it had been difficult to attract private developers to build smaller, more affordable homes, when they had previously focused on large and expensive construction projects.

Economist Shamubeel Eaqub agreed, saying the government should switch its attention to building rental properties instead.

Euqab said despite the urgency of the problem the government appeared to lack “ambition” in dealing with the severe lack of affordable housing.

“There is never a market for poor people, it is not profitable to build houses for poor people. That’s the challenge,” said Euqab.

Alain Bertaud, a former World Bank principal urban planner, said that despite New Zealand being an otherwise “exceptionally well-managed country” its housing market was in a state of crisis. He said the government’s efforts were being closely watched because they were broadly following global best practice in improving housing affordability.

The government’s measures would “take time” to implement and take effect, Bertaud said. “After the government has successfully passed these reforms, the international community will watch with great interest the impact it will have on Auckland … in the next few years,” Bertaud said in the report.

Many of the KiwiBuild homes already completed are languishing on the market, with many considering NZ$525,000 (£273,000) for a two-bedroom home far from affordable.

In Auckland and Queenstown – the two most expensive cities in New Zealand – KiwiBuild houses are capped at NZ$500,00 for a one-bedroom home, NZ$600,000 for a two-bed, and NZ$650,000 for three bedrooms or more.

The authors of the Demographia International Housing Affordability survey class a house as affordable if the median price is up to three times the median wage – making the government’s KiwiBuild houses “severely unaffordable” for most.

On Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest online auction website, some private home sales were being advertised as “cheaper than a KiwiBuild” and “much more affordable than KiwiBuild”.

The oppositions spokesperson for housing, Judith Collins, said it appeared that Kiwis didn’t want a KiwiBuild home, and the project was a failure.

“It’s incredibly embarrassing for the minister, who not only can’t reach his much-plugged target of 1,000 KiwiBuild homes, but the houses he has built are clearly not what first home buyers want,” said Collins.

“The minister’s blatant disregard for detail has been shown time and time again, and now he’s putting hardworking taxpayer money at risk because of it.”

Guardian UK