Ezekiel

My nan always said I had good hands for building things. Growing up on Broadwater Farm, I watched her fix everything that broke in our flat because the council took weeks to send anyone round. When the kitchen tap started leaking, she'd wrap it in rubber and tape until it held. When the heating packed up in winter, she'd jury-rig the thermostat with matchsticks and wire. She taught me that if something's broken, you don't wait for someone else to fix it. You learn how it works and you fix it yourself.

After I left school at sixteen, I worked warehouse jobs and scaffolding to help keep us going. The money was alright, but by the time I turned nineteen, my back was telling me I needed something different. Lifting heavy loads twelve hours a day wasn't going to last me until retirement. I'd been watching the electricians who came to the sites, seeing how they worked with their hands but didn't have to carry everything on their shoulders. That was when I decided to get proper training.

In 2023, I applied to the Construction Industry Training Board for an electrical apprenticeship through their grant scheme. I'd done my research. I knew they had funding specifically for people like me, people who wanted to learn a trade and contribute something real. When I called them up, they told me their London funding had been "reallocated to areas with lower infrastructure spend" and suggested I try private providers instead.

So I tried the College of North East London. They quoted me £8,000 for Level 2 electrical installation. Eight thousand pounds. I was making minimum wage in a warehouse. I might as well have asked them to quote me for a trip to the moon.

I went to Haringey Council's employment service next. They were sympathetic, said they understood the situation, but their training budget had been cut. They referred me to the National Careers Service, who told me local authority training budgets had been "consolidated at regional level for efficiency savings." Every person I spoke to was helpful individually, but the system they were working within seemed designed to say no at every stage.

I spent months calling training providers across North London. Each one told me the same thing: "There is no funding." Private courses cost thousands. Government schemes had waiting lists longer than the courses themselves. The few subsidised places that existed were oversubscribed ten to one. It all sounded reasonable when they explained it. Everyone was doing their best with limited resources. The money just wasn't there.

Then in January 2024, walking past the old Tottenham Green Centre, I noticed coaches parked outside. The building had been empty for months, but there was clearly something going on. I looked through the windows and saw something that made me stop walking.

Inside were fully equipped electrical workshops. Proper ones. Testing boards, cable runs, tool benches, everything you'd need to train twenty people properly. The equipment was all there, pristine and unused. I could see the training bays set up exactly like the ones I'd seen in the college prospectus, except these were empty.

I found the security guard and asked him what was happening with the building. He told me the Construction Industry Training Board had block-booked twenty training places for local residents. The course was supposed to start in December, but "head office pulled the funding last month because Treasury said construction spending was inflationary."

I stood there looking at those workshops for twenty minutes. The tools were there. The equipment was there. The building was there. People like me were out here walking past every day, wanting exactly this training. But someone in Westminster had decided that connecting us to those workshops would somehow damage the economy.

That was the moment I started to understand what "there is no money" actually meant. It didn't mean the pounds sterling had run out. It didn't mean the materials had vanished or the teachers had disappeared. It meant someone with the power to authorise spending had chosen not to authorise it.

I walked around Tottenham that evening thinking about it differently. The same week I'd seen those empty workshops, the local paper had run another story about the housing waiting list hitting 13,000 families. Thirteen thousand families who needed homes, and workshops sitting empty that could have been training people like me to build them.

The government that prints the money on my payslips had told me it couldn't find enough of that money to put people in those workshops. But the workshops existed. The people existed. The housing need existed. What exactly was it that required money that didn't exist?

I kept thinking about my nan, fixing everything that broke because waiting for official help meant waiting forever. She never told me we couldn't afford wire and tape. She went to the shop, bought what she needed, and fixed the problem. That's what governments are supposed to do, isn't it? Identify a problem, allocate resources, solve it.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised the problem wasn't the absence of money. The UK government issues its own currency. It doesn't have to find pounds before it spends them, any more than a football stadium has to find points before it awards them to teams. The constraint was never the money. The constraint was the decision not to spend it.

I understand now what I didn't understand when I first applied for that apprenticeship. When someone in authority tells you "there is no funding," they're not describing a law of nature. They're describing a choice. Someone, somewhere, decided that training electricians was less important than keeping government spending figures low. Someone decided that empty workshops were preferable to trained workers.

That someone was not my nan, fixing our heating with matchsticks and determination. That someone was not me, willing to work twelve-hour shifts to learn a trade. That someone was not the families on the housing waiting list, or the builders who could employ us once we were trained.

That someone sits in an office in Westminster and treats the government budget like a household budget, rationing pounds as though the government has to earn them before it can spend them. But governments don't work for money. Money works for governments. The Bank of England doesn't run out of pounds any more than Wimbledon runs out of points.

What happened to me is happening right now to someone else in another constituency, where the people exist and the need exists and the capacity exists, but someone has decided that connecting them would cost too much money that was never scarce to begin with.