Sanjay

I keep my father's old British Rail cap on my bookshelf. He came here from Punjab in the 1970s to work as a railway engineer when public transport was still seen as something worth building properly. That cap sits next to my civil engineering degree from Nottingham Trent, and sometimes I wonder what he would make of what has happened to his industry. He believed you could build a country by connecting its places. I wanted to carry that work forward.

When I finished university in 2018, I thought the opportunities would be obvious. The East of England has some of the worst transport connections in the country. Rural communities cut off when bus services stopped running. Freight struggling to move efficiently from the Fens to ports because the rail network was designed for Victorian cargo patterns. Towns like Wisbech, where I grew up, watching their young people leave because you cannot get anywhere without a car. I looked at these problems and saw work that needed doing. Real work. The kind of infrastructure projects that could employ dozens of engineers and construction workers for years.

In 2019, I applied to join the Department for Transport's infrastructure development team. The response came back within a week. They were hiring, they said, but only for London-based projects. The spending allocation had been set by Treasury, and it focused on routes that showed immediate economic returns. That meant London and the South East. Everything else would have to wait. I asked about the transport needs I could see in my own region. The officer I spoke to was polite but clear: "There is no funding for those areas at the moment."

It sounded reasonable. Budgets have limits. Priorities have to be set. I accepted it and moved on.

I approached Cambridgeshire County Council next. Surely the local authority would understand the transport gaps in its own patch. I met with the transport officer in a windowless room in Shire Hall. She pulled out a folder of cancelled bus routes and shelved improvement schemes. Their transport budget had been cut by 40% since 2010, she explained. They were focused on maintaining what they had, not expanding it. When I asked about rural connectivity projects, she said the same thing I had heard before: "There is no funding."

Network Rail offered me temporary work on minor maintenance tasks. Track inspections, signal repairs, the kind of routine work that keeps trains running but does not expand the network. When I asked about major route improvements, about freight connections, about electrification projects, the manager shook his head. Those investments were "not economically viable" outside the South East. The business case did not stack up. I spent six months crawling under carriages and checking rail joints, watching goods lorries thunder past on the A47 because the freight line they could have used was deemed unprofitable.

Last year, I contacted the East of England Development Corporation. They had been set up to drive economic growth in the region. Surely they would understand that transport infrastructure was the foundation for everything else. The development officer I met was enthusiastic about my proposals. Freight rail connections to move produce from the Fens. Better passenger links to connect market towns to employment centres. Electrification to reduce emissions and improve journey times. She took notes. She asked intelligent questions. Then she explained about Treasury spending rules.

Every transport project had to show immediate profit. Not long-term economic benefits. Not social value. Not environmental impact. Immediate, measurable, financial returns that could be calculated within a five-year horizon. The development corporation could lobby for projects that met those criteria, she said, but everything I had described fell short. When I asked why profitable routes were the only ones worth building, she gave me the same line I was learning to expect: "The budget has been cut. We cannot afford to run programmes that do not pay for themselves."

That was when I started noticing the contradiction.

A month after that meeting, I was walking through March when I passed the old British Rail training centre. The building was locked, but I could see through the windows. The workshop bays were still there. Track-laying machinery sat under dust sheets. Welding stations. Hydraulic rail benders. Signal testing equipment. Everything you would need to train a new generation of railway workers, sitting idle in the dark.

That same week, I was at the job centre in Peterborough and met Toby. He had trained as a mechanical engineer at Cambridge Regional College. We got talking about work, and it turned out he had been trying to get into transport infrastructure for two years. Same story as mine. No funding. Budget cuts. Projects cancelled. Here were two qualified engineers, both looking for exactly the same kind of work, both told it did not exist.

But I could see the abandoned training centre. I knew about the cancelled projects. I had met the transport officer with her folder of shelved improvements. The need existed. The skills existed. The equipment existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

That question changed everything for me. I started looking differently at every rejection I had received. The Department for Transport had not said the engineering expertise was unavailable. They had not said the materials could not be sourced. They had not said the routes were physically impossible to build. They had said there was no funding. But the government that issues the pound told me it could not find enough pounds to deploy the engineers 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 freight routes I wanted to build would use British steel, British concrete, British labour. The training centre in March could be reopened tomorrow if someone decided it was worth doing. The engineers at the job centre could be put to work if someone chose to employ 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 am still here. Still watching. Still ready to build the transport links this region needs. And I know now that I am not the only one. In every constituency where skilled people sit idle while essential work goes undone, someone in Westminster is saying the cupboard is bare. But the cupboard belongs to the people who stock it.