Jenna

I grew up watching my dad leave the house at half past five every morning to catch the first train to Manchester. He'd worked at Horwich locomotive works since he left school, but when I was twelve, they closed the factory and moved production south. Dad could have kept his job if he'd relocated to Derby, but we couldn't afford to move and couldn't afford for him to stay away during the week. So he took redundancy and spent the next two years travelling an hour and a half each way to a maintenance job in Manchester that paid half what he'd earned building trains in his own town.

That's when I decided I wanted to work in transport. Not just because of Dad, but because I could see what happened to places when the connections got severed. Horwich had been built around the railway works. When the works closed, the town didn't die, but something vital went out of it. I studied civil engineering through night classes at Manchester Met while working days at the garden centre, thinking about the kind of infrastructure that could have kept Dad's commute manageable, or brought new industry to our doorstep. I had this vision of being part of the team that would finally connect the North West properly, make it so families like mine didn't have to choose between work and home.

I applied to Network Rail's graduate scheme in 2019, full of hope. The rejection letter was polite but clear: "Due to current budget constraints, we have had to freeze recruitment for graduate positions." I applied again in 2020 and got the same response, almost word for word. The third time, in 2021, the language had changed slightly but the message was identical. "There is no funding for new graduate positions at this time."

I accepted it. Everyone was tightening their belts after the pandemic, and it sounded reasonable that a big organisation like Network Rail would have to make tough choices. I started looking elsewhere. Transport for Greater Manchester had launched an infrastructure planning course, exactly the kind of training I needed. I enrolled in early 2022, bought the textbooks, arranged childcare for my seven-year-old daughter around the course schedule. Two weeks before it was due to start, they cancelled it. The email from TfGM explained: "The Department for Transport has withdrawn funding for this training programme. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused."

I went to Bolton Council next. They had a small transport planning team, and I'd heard they were struggling with workload. The conversation with the team leader was encouraging until I asked about positions. "We'd love to take on someone with your background," she said, "but we cannot afford to run that programme without central government funding. The Treasury has been very clear about local authority recruitment freezes."

By early 2023, I was getting desperate. I'd been trying for four years to break into the sector, and every door led to the same explanation. Then Balfour Beatty advertised for their Northern Powerhouse infrastructure projects. I got an interview, my first proper interview in transport planning. The hiring manager was apologetic but honest. "The budget has been cut for northern projects," he told me. "Most of the major rail investments are being directed south now. We're running skeleton crews in Manchester. I wish I had better news."

Walking home from that interview, I took a detour past the old Horwich Works. I'd avoided it for years because it reminded me of Dad, but that day I needed to see it. The site was still there, massive Victorian engineering workshops built to last centuries. The roofs were intact, the walls solid, the crane rails still mounted to the ceiling beams. But the gates were padlocked shut, weeds growing through the railway sleepers where they used to shunt the locomotives between the workshops.

That's when something clicked. Three of my neighbours were qualified construction workers who'd been unemployed for over a year. Sarah next door had twenty years' experience in project management and couldn't find work. Mark from two streets over was a qualified electrician who'd worked on rail projects until his company downsized. All of us were being told the same thing: there is no money. But we were all here. The skills were here. The workshops were here, standing empty.

I started to wonder what exactly there was no money for. The buildings existed. The people existed. The materials existed – I could see the construction supply yard from my bedroom window, fully stocked, lorries coming and going every day. What was missing? The government that prints the pound notes was telling me it couldn't find enough pound notes to pay us to do the work that everyone agreed needed doing.

It didn't make sense as an accounting problem. My household budget works differently from the government's budget. When I say I can't afford something, I mean I literally don't have the cash and can't get it. But the government issues the currency. It doesn't need to find pounds before it spends them. It creates them when it spends them.

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 understand now that this is not just my story. 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 is full. The choice is who gets to reach into it.