Stuart

I grew up watching my dad fix machines at the Ford plant in Dagenham. He had these hands that could figure out any problem, take apart an engine and put it back together better than it was. When Ford closed, he said the skills didn't disappear, just the jobs did. I didn't really understand what he meant until I tried to get trained as a bricklayer.

I'd been drifting through warehouse work since college, picking orders and loading vans, nothing that really grabbed me. Then my mate Danny got me started as a labourer on the housing developments going up around Basildon. First day holding a trowel, mixing mortar, laying my first course of bricks, something just clicked. The way each brick had to sit perfectly level, how you could feel when the mortar was exactly the right consistency, building something solid that would be there for decades. I wanted to get properly qualified, learn the craft properly.

Early 2023, I contacted South Essex College about their bricklaying apprenticeship. The woman on the phone was nice enough, explained the course structure, told me they had excellent workshop facilities. Then she said the Construction Industry Training Board funding had been allocated elsewhere and there were no places available. She suggested I try again next year, maybe something would open up.

I didn't want to wait a year. I drove to the Construction Skills Centre in Harlow, thinking they might have something. The advisor walked me through their training yard, showed me the workshop spaces, proper brick kilns, all the kit you'd need. Place looked professional, well-equipped. Then he sat me down in his office and explained that while they had the space and the instructors, "the budget simply isn't there for new cohorts." Said they were hoping funding might be restored later in the year, but couldn't make any promises.

Getting frustrated now, but still thinking this was just how the system worked, I decided to go straight to the source. Drove to the Construction Industry Training Board office in Brentwood. The manager there was completely straight with me. He said, "We've had our levy funding redirected to treasury priorities. There's no funding for training right now." He explained that construction companies pay into a levy that's supposed to fund training, but central government had other uses for that money. Made sense to me at the time. Money's tight, government's got to make choices.

I accepted it. Everyone I'd spoken to seemed reasonable, professional. They weren't being awkward, just dealing with the reality of their budgets. I figured that's how things worked, you just had to wait until the money became available again.

Then I was working on a site in Billericay, new housing development, and the site manager was constantly complaining about the shortage of skilled bricklayers. Said they were behind schedule because they couldn't find enough qualified people. I got talking to this electrician who was unemployed, looking for work, and he mentioned something that stuck with me. He said he'd walked past the Construction Skills Centre in Harlow the week before, seen the workshops through the windows, and they were completely empty. All the equipment was still there, covered in dust sheets, like they'd just locked the door and walked away.

That got me thinking. The following week I drove past South Essex College, had a proper look at their brick training yard. There was the sign by the gate: "Spaces Available for September 2023." But the yard was empty, kilns were cold, no students anywhere. I could see the training bays through the fence, all the stations set up for learning, nobody using them.

That's when the contradiction hit me. Here I was, ready to train. Here was an unemployed electrician wanting to get back to work. Here were training centres with empty workshops, equipment sitting idle, instructors presumably twiddling their thumbs. Here were housing developments behind schedule because they couldn't find skilled workers. And everyone's telling me "there's no money" to connect these dots.

I started to think about what my dad had said about skills not disappearing when Ford closed. The machinery was still there. The workers were still there. The knowledge was still there. What disappeared was someone's willingness to keep paying for them to work together.

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. But the training centres existed. The instructors existed. I existed. The housing targets that weren't being met existed. 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. When they said "there's no funding," what they meant was "we've chosen not to fund this." When they said "the budget isn't there," what they meant was "we've chosen to spend the budget elsewhere." The government issues the currency. It doesn't find pounds under the sofa cushions, it creates them when it spends them.

I think about all those empty workshops, all those cold kilns, all those housing developments running behind schedule for want of skilled workers, and I understand now that this isn't just my story. Walk through any constituency in England and you'll find the same pattern. People who want to work, work that needs doing, training centres with capacity, and someone in Westminster explaining that the cupboard is bare while holding the key to the mint.