Rhys

My name is Rhys. I'm 32, and I grew up watching my father and grandfather head off to the steelworks in Port Talbot every morning, their boots clattering down our street before dawn. When Tata Steel announced the job cuts in 2016, I knew that world was ending. I had a seven-year-old daughter to think about, and I wasn't going to let her watch me sit around waiting for an industry that wasn't coming back.

Construction made sense. Drive through Swansea Bay and you could see the cranes everywhere, new housing developments stretching along the coast. Wales needed homes, and I needed work that would last. I'd always been good with my hands, helped my father build our garden wall when I was fifteen. Bricklaying seemed like a solid trade, something I could build a future on. I wanted to give my daughter the stability my father couldn't give me when the redundancy notice came through.

In early 2023, I applied to Bridgend College for their Level 2 bricklaying programme. The woman on the phone was apologetic but firm. "The course is full," she told me. "We have a six-month waiting list." Six months. I asked if there were other options, maybe an evening course or a different start date. "There is no funding for additional places," she said. "The programme runs once a year, and we can only take the numbers we're allocated."

I contacted the Construction Industry Training Board directly, thinking they might have apprenticeship opportunities. They sent me a list of local contractors who were registered with their scheme. I called the first three. Morgan Construction in Neath told me they weren't taking apprentices. "We're not set up for training right now," the foreman said. Curious, because their website had job listings for qualified bricklayers. I called Jenkins & Sons in Port Talbot. Same story. "We cannot afford to run an apprenticeship programme at the moment." Yet they were advertising for experienced construction workers.

Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council's employment team referred me to Working Links for a skills assessment. I thought this might finally connect me to real training opportunities. Instead, I spent two months in 'employability workshops' learning to write CVs and practice interview techniques. Meanwhile, I could see construction jobs advertised in the local paper every week. The assessment concluded I was "work-ready" but couldn't point me toward any actual construction training that had available places.

Finally, in January 2024, I got a place at Coleg Gwent's construction skills centre. I was excited, ready to start learning the trade properly. The first day, I arrived expecting workshops, tools, building materials. What I found was a classroom with textbooks and a computer. "The budget has been cut," the tutor explained. "We cannot afford to run practical sessions anymore. The workshop equipment hasn't been updated since 2019, and there's no money for materials."

I sat through weeks of theory about mixing mortar and laying foundations, but never touched a brick. Other students were equally frustrated. One lad, Jamie, lived three streets away from me. He'd been trying to get construction training for over a year. Another, David, had been made redundant from the same steelworks. All of us wanted to do exactly the same work, all of us ready to learn, all of us sitting in a classroom instead of building anything.

That's when I started to notice the contradictions. Walking past the college workshop one afternoon, I peered through the windows. Benches, tools, even bags of cement stacked in the corner. Everything you'd need to teach bricklaying, sitting unused because "there was no money" to run the practical course. The resources were right there. The building existed. The people existed. So what exactly was it that the money was supposed to buy?

I started paying attention differently. The same week our tutor told us the budget had been cut, I read that the Welsh Government was struggling to meet its housing targets. They needed more construction workers. We wanted to become construction workers. The training facilities existed. The tools existed. The instructors existed, though they weren't allowed to use the workshops.

This is when I started to understand something I'd never questioned before. Every time someone said "there is no money," I'd accepted it as a fact about the world, like saying there's no water in a drought. But the government that was telling me it couldn't afford construction training is the same government that prints the pound notes in my wallet. It's the same government that issues the currency that pays for everything from roads to hospitals to benefits.

The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed who wanted to learn construction skills. They did, I was sitting next to them every day. It was about whether buildings and equipment existed to teach those skills. They did, I could see them through the workshop windows. It was about whether Wales needed more construction workers. It did, the housing targets proved that.

The government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect the people to the work. That wasn't an accounting problem. That was a political decision dressed up as a budget constraint.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins told me it could not find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready 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 was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It is the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household does not 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 the people who needed it.

I'm still here, still watching, still ready to work. I know now that what happened to me isn't just bad luck or poor timing. It's happening in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. Someone just decided not to open it.