Jamie

I keep my grandfather's Ordnance Survey maps in the kitchen drawer, the ones he used when he worked on the A47 improvements back in the 1970s. He was proud of that road, the way it connected the Fens to the wider world. I used to trace the route with my finger when I was small, imagining the planning meetings, the surveying, the concrete being poured. That's what drew me to civil engineering: the idea that you could build something that would last, something that would help people get where they needed to go.

My dad came over from Poland to work the farms around Wisbech. My mum was a teaching assistant at the local primary. They saved everything they could to send me to Peterborough Regional College for my engineering qualification. For eight years after that, I worked on flood defences across the Fens, maintaining the pumping stations and embankments that keep these communities dry. It was good work, necessary work. Until the Environment Agency's maintenance budget was slashed and half the team was made redundant. That was early 2023.

I started applying for transport infrastructure projects straight away. First stop was Cambridgeshire County Council's highways department. I walked into their offices in Cambridge with my CV and portfolio, thinking they'd need someone with local knowledge of drainage and soil conditions. The manager looked through my qualifications and nodded approvingly. Then she said they couldn't hire anyone. Their capital programme had been frozen due to "challenging financial circumstances." She suggested I try Network Rail.

Network Rail's East Anglia route development team had an office near Peterborough station. I met with their project coordinator, a woman who'd worked on rail infrastructure for fifteen years. She flipped through my experience with earthworks and foundation systems. "This is exactly what we need," she said. "But we have no current vacancies due to spending constraints imposed by the Department for Transport." The way she said it, like she was reading from a script she'd memorized.

I started approaching construction firms bidding for HS2 work. The first company I visited had a smart office in a business park outside Cambridge. The hiring manager was enthusiastic about my flood defence background until I mentioned I was looking for work locally. "All our HS2 contracts are going to the Midlands and North," he explained. "Nothing happening here in the East."

Highways England had a different response. Their regional recruiter redirected me to their graduate scheme, which sounded promising until she added that it had been suspended "pending budget reviews." The Department for Transport's regional office in Cambridge was my next attempt. A civil servant there listened politely to my situation and told me local transport investment had been "deprioritised in favour of London infrastructure projects."

Every conversation followed the same pattern. People would look at my qualifications and say exactly what I wanted to hear: "We need someone with your skills." Then came the same phrase, delivered in slightly different words each time: "There is no funding."

At first, I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was saying it, from council officers to government departments. Budgets are tight. Money is scarce. You have to prioritize. I understood the logic because I'd grown up in a household where every pound had to be accounted for.

Then I started noticing things that didn't fit.

Walking past Peterborough station one morning, I saw the old Network Rail training centre. It had been empty for two years, its car park full of weeds growing through the tarmac. The building was solid, purpose-built for exactly the kind of infrastructure training that everyone said they couldn't afford to run. The classrooms were still there, the equipment was still there, but the doors were locked.

In the job centre, I met three other qualified engineers: Sarah, who'd worked on bridge construction in Norfolk; Mike, who'd done roadworks around Ely; and David, who specialized in rail signaling systems. All of us looking for the same work that everyone said there was no money for. We'd sit in that waiting room, four people with decades of combined experience in transport infrastructure, while civil servants explained that transport infrastructure couldn't be funded.

I started asking different questions. If Sarah existed, and Mike existed, and David existed, and I existed, and we all had the skills they said they needed, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The people were here. The buildings were here. The roads that needed upgrading were definitely here – I drove on them every day.

My neighbor Marcus had worked construction around Hertfordshire before moving to Wisbech. He mentioned similar frustrations with projects that should exist but somehow never got funded. "They keep saying there's no money," he told me over the garden fence one afternoon. "But every time there's a bank in trouble, they find £500 billion overnight."

That's when I started to understand something I hadn't grasped before. The government that issues the pound was telling me it couldn't find enough pounds to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. The same government that creates every pound that exists was claiming it had run out of pounds.

The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed – we did. Whether the skills could be taught – they could. Whether the materials were available – they were. Whether the roads and rail lines needed upgrading – they absolutely did.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When my parents saved up for my college fees, they had to find money they didn't have. But the government doesn't save up pounds. It issues them. 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 watching, still applying for positions that everyone says cannot be funded. But I understand now what I didn't understand at the start. What happened to me wasn't bad luck or economic inevitability. It was a series of political choices made by people who had alternatives.

I hear "there is no funding" differently now. I know it means: we chose not to create the funding. We chose to leave the engineers unemployed and the infrastructure unbuilt. We chose to treat the currency we issue as though it were foreign currency we had to borrow.

This isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. It was locked.