Keisha

My name is Keisha, I'm 34, and I've lived in Blackpool all my life. I grew up in Bloomfield ward, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an English mother, and I always thought I'd end up working in the hotels like most people here. I started as a cleaner after leaving school, then moved into retail, but everything changed when my nan developed dementia. Watching her struggle, seeing how much difference good care made on her better days, I realised this was what I was meant to do. I wanted to help people like her, to give families what mine had needed. My seven-year-old daughter used to say I lit up when I talked about it, and she was right.

In 2023, I applied to Blackpool Council's adult social care team. I'd done my research, prepared for the interview, imagined myself finally doing work that mattered. The interview went well. They liked my experience with nan, my understanding of what families go through. Then they told me the starting salary: £19,500. I did the maths walking home. After rent, childcare, travel costs, I'd have been worse off than on Universal Credit. The job I wanted most in the world would have made it impossible to keep a roof over my daughter's head.

I tried the private sector instead. Comfort Call told me they'd love to have me but could only offer zero-hour contracts at minimum wage. "We never know how many clients we'll have week to week," the manager explained. "There is no funding for guaranteed hours." Home Instead said the same thing. Caremark Blackpool offered me shifts but warned that some weeks there might be none at all. Every agency had the same story: they wanted experienced, committed carers, but they couldn't promise enough work to live on.

I decided to get qualified properly. If I had better credentials, maybe I could command better terms. I enrolled in Level 3 Health and Social Care at Blackpool and The Fylde College, working part-time to pay for it while claiming Universal Credit to survive. I finished it in six months, working harder than I ever had, staying up after my daughter went to bed to complete assignments. I was proud of that certificate. I thought it would change everything.

Better Healthcare (Blackpool) Ltd offered me a senior carer role at £20,800 annually. Finally, a salary I could almost live on. But in the induction, I learned they'd just lost two major council contracts because they'd been outbid by agencies offering even lower rates. "The budget has been cut," the area manager told us. "We cannot afford to run that programme at the rates they're offering now." Redundancies were likely within months. I'd gained the qualification, found the job, only to discover the ground was shifting under the entire sector.

I went straight to the source. I contacted Lancashire County Council's commissioning team and asked about fair wage initiatives. Surely they understood that poverty wages meant high turnover, poor care, burned-out staff. The procurement officer was sympathetic but clear: "We are bound by procurement rules requiring lowest cost bids. There is no funding to pay above market rates." Market rates that no one could live on, rates that were driving people out of care work altogether.

That's when I started noticing things that didn't add up. The council offices were full of recruitment posters: "Care Workers Wanted," "Make a Difference," "Join Our Team." But walk past Blackpool and The Fylde College and you'd see training places sitting empty. Twenty-four spaces in the next Health and Social Care intake, only eight filled. I knew at least six people in my street alone who wanted to get into care work but couldn't afford to take the pay cut. The college tutor told me they'd had to cancel the advanced care management course because "there's no point training people for jobs that don't pay enough to live on."

Then I'd drive past the old training centre on Cookson Street, the one that used to run specialist dementia care courses. Locked up now, windows boarded, car park empty. "We cannot afford to run that programme," they'd said when it closed in 2022. But the building was still there. The need was still there. The people who wanted to do the training were still there.

I started to understand something I hadn't before. When they said "there is no funding," what did that actually mean? The people existed, I could see them every day, people who wanted this work. The buildings existed, I could walk past them. The need existed, I saw it in every care home, every family struggling to support an elderly relative. The skills could be taught, I'd learned them myself. The materials were available, textbooks, equipment, training software.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I used to accept that excuse. It sounded reasonable, inevitable, like the weather. Everyone accepted it. The council accepted it when they set procurement rates. The care agencies accepted it when they offered starvation wages. The college accepted it when they cancelled courses. I accepted it when I took a part-time job at a care home in Lytham and topped it up with Universal Credit.

But 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'm still here, still working in care when I can get the shifts, still watching the same patterns repeat. I know now that this isn't just my story. It's playing out in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. Someone just chose to keep it locked.