Keisha

My name is Keisha, I'm thirty-four, and I live in Bloomfield, the same ward where I grew up with my Jamaican dad and English mum. I've always been drawn to looking after people. When my nan developed dementia, I watched the care workers who came to help her, and I knew that was the work I wanted to do. There's something about being there for someone in their most vulnerable moments, helping them keep their dignity, that felt like the most important job in the world. I have a seven-year-old daughter, and my dream is to buy us a little house near the seafront where I spent my childhood summers.

I started applying for care work properly in twenty twenty-three. First, I tried Blackpool Council's adult social care team directly. The job was everything I'd hoped for, working with vulnerable adults, making a real difference in people's lives. But when they offered me the position at nineteen thousand five hundred pounds a year, I had to turn it down. After rent and childcare costs, I'd have been worse off than on Universal Credit. The recruiter was sympathetic but said, "There is no funding for higher starting salaries. The budget has been cut year on year." It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening their belts.

So I tried the private agencies. Comfort Call told me they could offer minimum wage on a zero-hour contract, no guaranteed hours. Home Instead said the same thing. Caremark Blackpool offered twelve pounds an hour, which was better, but still zero-hour contracts and only if they had work available. The manager at Caremark explained, "We'd love to offer more security, but the council contracts don't pay enough for us to guarantee hours. There is no funding for proper employment contracts." Again, it sounded like an unfortunate fact of life.

I decided to get qualified. I enrolled in the Level Three Health and Social Care course at Blackpool and The Fylde College. I threw myself into it, completed it in six months instead of the usual year. I learned about person-centered care, safeguarding, medication management. I was ready to make a real contribution. I applied to Better Healthcare Blackpool Limited for a senior carer role. They offered me twenty thousand eight hundred pounds annually, a proper contract, everything I'd been working toward.

Then I learned they'd just lost two major council contracts to agencies that had underbid them. The supervisor was honest with me: "We wanted to pay fair wages, but the council has to choose the lowest bidder. We might have to make redundancies within months. There is no funding to compete with agencies that pay minimum wage." I watched another door close.

I thought maybe I could approach this differently. I applied directly to Lancashire County Council's commissioning team, asking about fair wage initiatives for care providers. The procurement officer was polite but firm: "We're bound by public procurement rules. We have to accept the lowest cost bid that meets minimum standards. There is no funding available to pay above market rates."

At first, I accepted all of this. It was the same answer everywhere: no funding, budget cuts, impossible arithmetic. It sounded like the natural order of things, like gravity or the weather.

But then I started noticing things that didn't fit.

I was walking past Blackpool and The Fylde College one afternoon, and I saw the Health and Social Care building. Half the classrooms were empty. I asked at reception and learned they had spaces for sixty more students on the care courses, but not enough applicants. Not because people didn't want to do the work, but because word had got around about the wages. I thought about all the people I knew who were unemployed, who'd said they'd love to do care work if it paid enough to live on.

Then I was in the town center and I bumped into Sharon, who lives three streets from me. She'd been trying to get onto the same course I'd done, but couldn't afford to stop claiming benefits for the unpaid placement weeks. She said five of her neighbors had looked into care work but couldn't make the numbers add up. Meanwhile, I knew from my applications that every agency was crying out for trained staff.

The following week, I was walking down Central Drive and I noticed the old Social Services training center. It's been locked up for two years now. A security guard told me it used to train sixty care workers a year until it was closed due to budget cuts. The building was still there. The equipment was still inside. The trainers had found other work, but some were still local.

That's when I stopped accepting the excuse.

The people existed. I'd met them. The buildings existed. I'd seen them. The need existed. I'd worked in care homes where they were desperately short-staffed. What exactly was it that "there is no money" for?

I started thinking about how money actually works. When I buy something in a shop, the pounds have to come from somewhere, my bank account, my wallet. But where do the pounds in my wallet come from originally? They come from the government. The Bank of England, which is part of the government, creates them. The government doesn't have to find pounds hiding under the sofa before it can spend them. It creates the pounds when it spends.

So when Lancashire County Council said "there is no funding to pay above market rates," what they really meant was: "The Department of Health and Social Care has decided not to create the pounds that would allow us to pay living wages." When Blackpool Council said "the budget has been cut year on year," what they meant was: "Westminster has chosen not to create the pounds we need to run proper services."

The shortage was never about money. It was about a political decision to keep the money supply tight in this sector while people and buildings sat idle.

I'm still here, still working part-time at a care home in Lytham while claiming Universal Credit to make ends meet. But I see things differently now. 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 buildings were available. They were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When someone says "we cannot afford it," they sound like a household counting coins in a jar. Except a household does not issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to create it and spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

Now when I hear "there is no funding," I translate it: "We have chosen not to create the funding." And I know that in every constituency across the country, there are people like me who've been given the same excuse while they watch the resources sit idle around them. The question isn't whether Britain can afford to train its people. The question is whether it chooses to.