Tyrone

I'm Tyrone. I'm 34, and I've been watching the cranes go up across South London my whole life, wondering who gets to work on those sites. When I was 16, I left school to help support my mum after dad had his accident. Spent the next fourteen years moving boxes in warehouses, watching my back ache more each winter, thinking there had to be something better. I've always been good with my hands, always liked building things, fixing things. At 30, I decided I was done with dead-end jobs. I wanted to learn a proper trade, something that mattered. Construction made sense. You can see what you've built at the end of the day. There's dignity in that.

I started with Lambeth College in 2023. Walked into their admissions office on a Tuesday morning, asked about their bricklaying course. The woman behind the desk looked uncomfortable before she even opened her mouth. "I'm sorry," she said. "The full-time programme has been suspended due to insufficient government funding for construction apprenticeships." She handed me a leaflet about part-time courses, evening classes, but I needed something that would get me qualified properly, something that could lead to real work.

So I tried South Thames College instead. Same conversation, almost word for word. The advisor there was more apologetic about it. "We'd love to help," she said. "But the funding model changed this year. There is no funding for new full-time construction places." She suggested I look into other colleges further out, but I couldn't afford to travel to Kent every day, and besides, the problem seemed to be spreading everywhere I looked.

I went to the Job Centre Plus office on Brixton Road next. My advisor, a man called David, was honest enough. He pulled up something on his computer, scrolled through for a few minutes, then shook his head. "CITB funding has been redirected to other priorities," he said. "There's not much I can offer you in construction right now. Have you considered retail? There are always positions in retail." I'd spent fifteen years trying to get out of jobs like that. I wasn't going back.

But I wasn't giving up either. I contacted three construction companies directly, found their numbers online, called them up and asked about apprenticeships. All three conversations went the same way. The first company, a housing developer working on sites in Brixton, said they'd love to take me on but couldn't afford the training costs without government support. The second, smaller outfit doing renovation work, said exactly the same thing. The third company was bigger, had contracts across London, and the manager I spoke to was more detailed about the problem. "The levy system has been restructured," he told me. "Most of the London allocation is now going to existing large contractors, not new training places. It's a mess, to be honest. We need people like you, but we can't make the numbers work."

That's when I decided to call CITB directly. Took me three attempts to get through to someone who knew what they were talking about, but eventually I spoke to a woman who explained the whole situation. The levy system had been restructured, exactly like the construction manager had said. The money was there, but it was being allocated differently now, concentrated on the big players who already had training programmes running. New entrants like me, smaller companies who wanted to take on apprentices, we'd been pushed to the back of the queue.

I was walking past Lambeth College one afternoon, maybe two weeks after that phone call, and something caught my eye. The construction workshop was completely empty. I could see through the windows: tools still laid out on benches, dust sheets over the equipment, everything waiting for students who weren't coming. It looked like a classroom that had been abandoned mid-lesson, except the lesson had been abandoned for months.

I saw a lecturer coming out of the building, a woman in her fifties carrying a box of files. I stopped her, asked what was happening with the workshop. "We have capacity for 40 students," she told me. "But only 8 enrolled because the funding model changed. The workshop is fully equipped, we've got the staff, but we can't fill the places." She looked as frustrated as I felt. "It doesn't make sense," she said. "There's work out there, there are people who want to learn, but somehow we can't connect them."

That same week, I bumped into my neighbour Ezekiel outside the corner shop. We got talking, and it turned out he'd been having exactly the same problems trying to get into construction training, except he'd been looking at colleges up in Tottenham. Same story everywhere: courses suspended, funding redirected, people told to look elsewhere. Two men, living in different parts of London, both wanting to learn the same trade, both being told the same thing by different institutions. "There is no money."

But I started to see the contradiction. The buildings existed. The workshops existed. The tools existed. The lecturers existed. The people who wanted to learn existed. The companies who wanted to hire us existed. The housing developments that needed building existed. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I used to accept that excuse. It sounded reasonable. Everyone accepts it. But walking past that empty workshop every week, seeing the tools gathering dust while I was being turned away, something didn't add up. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to train 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 wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household doesn't 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 watching, still waiting. But I understand something now that I didn't understand when I walked into that first admissions office. 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, while the workshops sit empty and the housing targets remain unmet. The cranes are still going up across South London. But the people who could build those homes are still being told there's no money to teach them how.