Jude

I grew up in St Leonards watching my mum clean the same holiday flats every week, different families but always the same routine of changing sheets and scrubbing bathrooms. She'd come home exhausted, smelling of bleach, counting the hours until the next booking. I left school at 16 to work building sites because we needed the money, but I found something I was good at. When the sparky needed someone to thread cables or test circuits, I was the one he called over. I had an eye for it, could spot a dodgy connection before the tester even beeped. For years I told myself I'd get proper training one day, become a qualified electrician, maybe even run my own firm wiring the new estates they kept building around Hastings.

In early 2023, I finally applied to East Sussex College for their electrical installation course. I'd saved enough to cover the fees and living costs, had my application ready, even visited the campus to see the workshops. Three weeks later, I got a letter saying the programme was suspended due to funding constraints from the Construction Industry Training Board levy redistribution. They were very sorry. They suggested I contact other providers in the area.

Sussex Coast College Hastings was my next stop. I sat across from their careers advisor, a woman in her fifties who kept apologizing before she'd even explained the problem. She told me the CITB funding had been redirected away from coastal areas despite what she called acute housing shortages. She showed me a spreadsheet on her computer screen with allocation formulas I couldn't follow, all percentages and priority rankings. The courses existed, she said, but the money to run them had been sent somewhere else. She mentioned Crawley and Reading as examples of where the funding had gone instead. Places that were already building, she said, not places that needed to start.

I asked her how that made sense when I could see building sites going up everywhere around Hastings. She just shrugged and said the decisions were made in London, based on central government economic policy rather than local need. That was the phrase she used: local need. As if what we needed here didn't count the same as what they needed in Reading.

I tried Hastings Borough Council next, thinking maybe they'd know something about training for the housing they were supposed to build. The housing officer, a young man who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else, pulled up their targets on his screen. Eight hundred new homes with planning permission, he said, but they couldn't find enough qualified electricians to wire them. The shortage was holding everything up. When I told him I was trying to train as an electrician but couldn't find a funded course, he stared at me like I was speaking a different language. He suggested private training providers, then quoted fees of £4,000 that I couldn't afford. When I pointed out that this was exactly the problem, that the people who wanted to do the work couldn't get trained while the council couldn't find trained people to do the work, he said he understood but there was nothing he could do about funding decisions.

I applied directly to the Construction Industry Training Board, thinking maybe I could get individual funding. The response came back six weeks later. Their priority areas were determined by central government economic policy, not local housing need. There was that phrase again. They were very sorry, but Hastings and Rye was not currently designated as a priority area for construction skills funding. The letter included a list of priority areas. I recognized some of the names: places that were already building successfully, places that didn't need the help we needed here.

This was when I started to wonder about the phrase I kept hearing: "There is no funding." The woman at Sussex Coast College had said it. The housing officer had said it. The CITB letter had implied it. Everyone was very sorry, but there was no money. It sounded reasonable the first few times. Everyone accepts that there isn't enough money for everything.

Then I walked past the old East Sussex College campus on Station Plaza, the one where I'd originally planned to study. The building was still there. I peered through the windows and saw three fully equipped electrical workshops sitting empty. Circuit boards under dust covers. Testing equipment lined up on benches like it was waiting for students who never came. Everything needed to train electricians was right there: the space, the tools, the workbenches, even the wiring diagrams still taped to the walls.

I stood there looking through that window for a long time, thinking about what I'd been told. There was no funding to run courses in these workshops. But the workshops existed. The equipment existed. I existed, ready to learn. The eight hundred homes with planning permission existed, waiting to be wired. The housing officer existed, unable to find qualified electricians. The need existed. The capacity existed. The people existed.

What exactly was it that there was no money for?

That was when I started to understand something I hadn't understood before. The government that issues pound notes and mints pound coins was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to connect willing workers to empty workshops to housing that needed to be built. The real question wasn't about money at all. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the materials were available. Standing outside that building, I could see that they were. All of them.

The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. Like a household saying "we can't afford it," except a household doesn't print its own money. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and people who needed it.

I'm still here, still watching the building sites go up around Hastings, still seeing the "qualified electricians wanted" signs, still watching those workshops sit empty. But I hear the excuses differently now. When someone says there's no funding for training, I think about those dust covers over the circuit boards. When they say priorities are set by economic policy, I think about the eight hundred homes waiting to be wired and the people waiting to wire them.

I understand now that 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 government that controls the money supply claims it cannot find enough money to connect workers to work.