Jordan

I grew up on Orchard Park estate in Hull, in the same terrace house where I was born. My mum still lives there with my younger sister, and I never saw any reason to leave. This is my patch, these are my people, and I wanted to build a proper trade here. After leaving school at 16, I worked on building sites with my uncle for nearly six years. He taught me more about construction in those years than I ever learned in a classroom, but when his firm folded during the pandemic, I realised I needed proper qualifications to get steady work.

I decided to train as an electrician. There's always electrical work needed in Hull, especially with all the housing development plans the council keeps talking about. I knew I had the practical understanding from working with my uncle, but I needed the certificates that would let me work legally and safely. It seemed straightforward enough.

I applied to Hull College for their electrical installation course. The woman on the phone was friendly enough, but she told me the programme had been suspended due to "funding pressures from the Construction Industry Training Board". She said they hoped to restart it next year, but couldn't promise anything. I asked what that meant exactly, and she said CITB had reduced their allocation and the college couldn't afford to run the course without it.

That sounded reasonable. If there was no funding, there was no funding. I understood that much.

So I contacted CITB directly. I spent twenty minutes on hold before speaking to someone who told me their Yorkshire and Humber allocation had been "reduced in line with Treasury spending guidelines". He was apologetic but firm. The decision had been made at a national level, and there was nothing local offices could do about it. Budget constraints, he said. They had to prioritise.

I asked what they were prioritising instead, and he mentioned something about focusing resources on areas with "proven track records of completion rates". I didn't understand what that meant for someone like me who wanted to start a course, but again, it sounded like they had their reasons.

I tried East Riding College next. The woman there was more hopeful. She put me on a waiting list for their next intake and said she'd call when places became available. Months passed with no word. Every time I called, I got the same answer: they were still waiting for confirmation about funding, still hoping to announce dates soon.

Then one afternoon in October, I was walking past the college's construction training centre. The building was right there on the main road, and I'd passed it dozens of times, but this time I stopped and looked through the windows properly. What I saw didn't make sense.

Brand new electrical training rigs were sitting there unused. The kind of equipment I'd seen in the prospectus photos, still wrapped in protective plastic in some cases. Tool benches were covered with dust sheets like someone had closed up for the day months ago and never come back. There was a notice board by the entrance with course advertisements still pinned up from six months earlier, offering exactly the electrical installation programme I'd been trying to get onto.

I called the college that evening. The same woman who'd been putting me off for months answered. I asked her directly: if there were no places available, why was all the training equipment sitting empty? Why were the workshops not being used?

"Budget constraints," she said again. "We can't afford to run the programmes even though we have the facilities."

That was when something clicked. I started asking around Orchard Park, talking to people I'd grown up with. What I found made me angry. Seven of my neighbours had electrical or plumbing experience from previous jobs. All of them were on Universal Credit. All of them wanted to get back into trades work but couldn't access retraining programmes. When they'd asked about courses, they'd been told the same thing I had: no funding available.

Meanwhile, Hull City Council kept sending letters about their ambitious housebuilding targets. Thousands of new homes planned. All of them needing electricians, plumbers, gas fitters, all the trades that people like me and my neighbours wanted to learn or get back into.

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.

I could see the training rigs through the college windows. I knew seven people within walking distance of my house who wanted electrical or plumbing qualifications. The council had planning permission for housing developments that needed exactly those skills. The constraint was not the equipment, not the people, not the demand for their work.

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 then is that this is not just my story. Walk through any estate in Hull East, or Grimsby, or Rotherham, and you will find the same thing: people who want to work, facilities sitting empty, housing targets unmet, and someone in an office explaining that the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is not bare. The decision to keep it locked is political, not financial.