Marcus

I always liked working with my hands. When I was a kid in Eccles, I'd help my uncle Dave with his building jobs on weekends, mixing cement and fetching tools. He taught me that every brick has to sit just right, that you can see good work from the street. When he retired three years ago, I knew I wanted to do this properly. Not just weekend work or cash-in-hand extensions, but qualified bricklaying. My own business one day, maybe employing a couple of lads like Uncle Dave employed me.

I'd been renting the same flat since I was 21, and I had this idea that once I got my NVQ Level 2 and started earning decent money, I could save up for a deposit on my own place. Nothing fancy, just somewhere I could call mine. The building trade in Greater Manchester was busy. You could see it everywhere: cranes over Manchester city centre, new estates going up in Salford, planning notices on every spare bit of land. It felt like the right time to get properly qualified.

In January 2023, I applied to Salford City College for their bricklaying course. I'd done my research. They had a good reputation, decent workshops, connections to local firms for work experience. I filled out the forms, wrote about my experience with Uncle Dave, explained why I wanted to get qualified. Three weeks later, I got a letter back. Course was full. No additional funding available for extra places. Try again next year.

I didn't want to wait a year. I was 27, not getting any younger, and the housing boom wasn't going to last forever. So I tried Manchester College next. Same story, but with more detail. The woman on the phone was apologetic. "Our CITB funding has been reduced this year," she said. "We cannot afford to run the full programme. You'll have to wait until September, and even then we can only take half the students we used to."

That's when I made my first mistake. I found a private training provider in Bolton advertising fast-track bricklaying courses. They had a glossy website, testimonials from previous students, promises about job placement. The course fee was £800 upfront, but they said I'd earn it back in the first month of qualified work. I scraped together the money and signed up.

Two months later, they went bust. Just like that. Website disappeared, offices locked, my £800 gone. The other students and I got a text message one Tuesday morning. "Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are ceasing trading with immediate effect." No refunds, no forwarding address, no explanation.

By June, I was starting to feel desperate. I went back to Salford College in person, thinking maybe if I could speak to someone face-to-face, explain my situation, they might find a way to squeeze me in for the autumn intake. The woman at reception was kind but firm. Same story: no funding, courses oversubscribed, nothing they could do.

But walking back through the campus, I took a wrong turn and ended up passing the construction workshop. Through the windows, I could see rows of workbenches with nobody at them. Brand new tools hanging on the walls, unused. Fresh stacks of practice bricks sitting in the corner. I counted the workstations: enough for maybe 40 students. It was completely empty.

I found a tutor having a smoke break outside. Nice bloke, been teaching construction for fifteen years. I asked him about the empty workshop. He shook his head. "We've got space for 40 students," he said. "But we only have funding for 15. The workshop sits empty most days. We've got the equipment, we've got the space, we've got qualified instructors with nothing to do. But there is no funding."

At first, that sounded reasonable. Money's tight everywhere, isn't it? Budgets have to be managed. You can't spend what you don't have. I accepted it the same way you accept that it's raining: not ideal, but not something you can change.

Then I started noticing things that didn't fit. My neighbour Jenna works in transport planning for the council. Over a pint one evening, she mentioned that there were hundreds of approved housing developments across Greater Manchester. Planning permission granted, infrastructure approved, developers ready to start. But they couldn't find enough qualified tradespeople to begin construction. "The housing target is a joke," she said. "We approve the homes but there's nobody to build them."

The same week, I met two lads at my local pub who I'd never seen before. Both qualified electricians, both been unemployed for six months. They were originally from Birmingham, moved up here because they'd heard Manchester was booming. But they couldn't find steady work. Plenty of short-term contracts, but nothing reliable enough to plan around. They were thinking of moving back south.

I sat there listening to them complain about having no work while I was sat opposite them, unable to get trained for work that desperately needed doing. The bricks were there. The land was there with planning permission. The workshops were empty but equipped. The instructors were available but teaching half-empty classes. The qualified workers were unemployed while the training places sat vacant.

Something about this picture didn't add up. If the people exist, and the buildings exist, and the need exists, and the planning permission exists, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that prints pounds on paper and mints them in metal was telling me it couldn't find enough of those pounds to connect people who wanted to work with work that needed doing.

That's when I stopped accepting the excuse. I started asking different questions. Not "where does the money come from" but "why did someone choose not to spend it?" Because that's what it was: a choice. The same government that found billions for bank bailouts and tax cuts for corporations was saying it couldn't afford to train builders to construct the homes that already had planning permission.

I still want to be a qualified bricklayer. I'm still trying, still applying, still knocking on doors. But I understand something now that I didn't understand when I started. The block wasn't financial. It was political. Someone in Westminster looked at empty workshops, unemployed electricians, approved housing developments, and people like me wanting to get qualified, and decided it wasn't worth connecting us up.

They dressed that choice in the language of financial responsibility. Made it sound like basic accounting. But you can't run out of something you create. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and people who needed it. And I'm not the only one who's worked this out. Every estate in every constituency has people like me, watching resources sit idle while we're told the cupboard is bare.