Rhys

I'm Rhys, thirty-two years old, and I grew up watching my family build things. My grandfather laid bricks for the Port Talbot steelworks housing estate in the sixties. My father spent twenty-three years in the rolling mills before Tata Steel cut his job in 2016. When I saw the cranes going up around Swansea Bay, the new developments stretching toward the Mumbles, I thought: here's work that can't be shipped overseas. My daughter's seven now, and after watching my dad struggle through redundancy, I wanted to give her something solid. I wanted to build.

In March 2023, I walked into Bridgend College and asked about their construction courses. The woman behind the desk was friendly enough. She pulled up the system and shook her head. "The Level 2 bricklaying programme is full," she said. "We've got a six-month waiting list." I asked if there were other options. She handed me a leaflet for their joinery course, but that had a waiting list too. I left thinking: six months isn't forever. I'll wait.

But six months turned into eight, then ten. Every time I called, the answer was the same. "Still full. Still waiting." So I tried a different approach. I contacted CITB directly. The Construction Industry Training Board, they told me, coordinates apprenticeships across Wales. The advisor was helpful. She sent me a list of twelve local contractors who were registered for apprentice training. I started calling.

The first firm, Williams Construction in Neath, told me they weren't taking apprentices. "Not at the moment," the site manager said. But their website advertised three bricklayer vacancies. I called the second firm on the list. Same story. "We're not running apprenticeships right now." But when I drove past their Baglan site the following week, I saw a banner: 'Experienced Bricklayers Wanted. Apply Within.'

By the time I'd called all twelve contractors, three had given me the same line: we need qualified workers, but we're not training new ones. It made no sense. If you need workers and you won't train them, where exactly are they supposed to come from?

That's when Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council's employment team got involved. They referred me to Working Links, an employment support programme. "We'll do a skills assessment," the advisor explained, "and help you with employability." For two months, I sat in a portakabin in Port Talbot doing workshops on CV writing and interview techniques. Meanwhile, I could see construction sites from the window where work was happening without me.

The Working Links advisor was sincere. She genuinely wanted to help. But after eight weeks of role-playing job interviews, she had to admit the obvious: "The problem isn't your employability, Rhys. It's that nobody's running the courses you need." She made some calls and found me a place at Coleg Gwent's construction skills centre. Finally, I thought. A real training place.

I started at Coleg Gwent in January 2024, full of hope. The building looked professional: high ceilings, proper workshop spaces, the kind of place where you could learn to build properly. But on the first day, the instructor gathered us in a classroom, not the workshop. "This year's course is theory-based," he explained. "The workshop equipment hasn't been updated since 2019. Health and safety won't sign off on the tools."

I raised my hand. "How do we learn bricklaying without laying bricks?" He looked uncomfortable. "Budget constraints," he said. "There is no funding for new equipment." We spent twelve weeks learning about mortar ratios and building regulations from textbooks while the workshop next door sat locked.

The contradiction hit me one afternoon in February. I was walking through Port Talbot town centre when I passed the old Adult Learning Centre on Station Road. The building was empty, windows boarded up, but I could see through a gap in the fence. Inside was a complete brickwork training bay: practice walls, tool racks, even bags of sand stacked against the wall. All of it unused, while I sat in a classroom thirty miles away learning theory.

That's when I started asking different questions. Not "where can I find training?" but "why is that training centre locked while people like me need what's inside it?" The council had closed it in 2022. "Budget cuts," they said. "We cannot afford to run that programme." But the building existed. The equipment existed. People like me existed, wanting to learn exactly what that centre was designed to teach.

I used to accept that explanation. "No funding" sounded reasonable, like something beyond anyone's control. But the government that prints the pound notes told me it couldn't find enough of them to connect people who wanted to work with the skills they needed to work. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the materials were available. They were. All of them.

The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's the same logic as a household saying "we cannot afford it," except a household doesn't issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and people who needed it.

I'm still here, still watching, still ready to build. What I understand now that I didn't understand then is this: what happened to me wasn't bad luck or bureaucratic confusion. It was a series of political choices made by people who had alternatives. Every closed training centre, every unfilled apprenticeship, every empty construction course traces back to the same false idea: that the government's budget works like a household's budget.

But I've seen the proof that it doesn't. The proof is everywhere around us: the idle workers, the locked training centres, the unbuilt homes. My story isn't unique. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare.