Kieran

I've always been drawn to work that builds things that last. Growing up in Woolston, watching my father come home from the dockyards with stories of the ships taking shape, I knew I wanted to work with my hands and my head together. After my apprenticeship at BAE Systems, I spent fifteen years in shipbuilding before the yard downsized. That's when I retrained as a civil engineering technician. Now I run site surveys for transport projects, though the work has dried up considerably. My workshop at home is filled with precision measuring equipment that sits gathering dust more often than I'd like.

In 2019, I decided to be proactive. Southampton's transport network needed serious attention, particularly the long-promised improvements to Northam Bridge and the Bitterne Road corridor. These weren't pie-in-the-sky schemes, they were practical necessities that had been talked about for years. I approached Southampton City Council directly, offering my surveying services and knowledge of local conditions.

The response from their transport planning department was polite but firm. "The Department for Transport funding allocation was insufficient for major works this cycle," they explained. It sounded reasonable at the time. Budgets are tight, priorities have to be set, I understood that. But something nagged at me about the phrasing.

I tried Hampshire County Council next, focusing on the stalled A3024 upgrade project. This route carries thousands of vehicles daily, connecting Southampton to the wider region, and the improvements had been on their books for years. Their highways team was equally apologetic. "HM Treasury spending reviews have constrained our capital programme," they told me. Again, that careful bureaucratic language about constraints and reviews.

Frustrated but not defeated, I went straight to the source. I contacted the Department for Transport's regional office, proposing a consortium of local contractors ready to begin work immediately. I had done my homework. I knew who was available, what equipment they had, what their capabilities were. We could start within months if given the go-ahead.

The response was the most revealing yet. They cited "current fiscal constraints requiring prioritisation of London and national infrastructure." There it was in black and white. The money existed, but it was being spent elsewhere. London and national infrastructure came first. Places like Southampton came later, if at all.

That's when I started to notice things differently. Walking through the city, I passed the Solent Skills Centre and discovered something that didn't square with all the talk of constraints and insufficient budgets. They had three fully equipped civil engineering training bays sitting completely empty. State-of-the-art equipment, purpose-built facilities, everything needed to train the next generation of transport engineers. The reason? Their transport infrastructure course had lost government funding.

At a networking event, I met Cameron from nearby Hamble Valley. He told me similar stories from across the region. Projects approved in principle but never funded, training programmes cut just when demand was highest, experienced workers forced into other sectors because the work they were trained for couldn't get backing. We weren't isolated cases. This was happening everywhere.

The contradiction became impossible to ignore during one of my walks through the old Vosper Thornycroft area. The training facility there stands locked and unused, a testament to what used to be possible. But that's not what struck me most. It was seeing dozens of my former colleagues, engineers and technicians who had been made redundant from various projects, all of them more than capable of delivering the transport improvements Southampton desperately needs.

The people exist. The skills exist. The need certainly exists, anyone who has tried to get across the city during rush hour can tell you that. The equipment sits in empty training centers. The buildings that could house expanded programmes stand vacant. So what exactly was it that there was "no money" for?

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.

What I understand now that I didn't understand at the start is that every time someone in a council office or government department said "there is no funding," they were making a political choice sound like a law of nature. They were choosing to prioritize some places over others, some projects over others, some people over others. That choice didn't become more legitimate because it was dressed up in the language of fiscal responsibility.

I'm still here, still watching, still ready to work. But I no longer accept that the cupboard is bare when I can see with my own eyes that the cupboard is full of everything except the willingness to open it. This isn't just my story or Southampton's story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the resources simply aren't there. The resources are there. The decision not to use them is what's missing.