Raheem

I grew up watching my dad wire houses across Wood Green and Southgate. He had his own firm, just him and two other blokes, but they were proper electricians. Knew every regulation, could run cables through a Victorian terrace like threading a needle. When his business went under in 2008, I was sixteen and had to leave school to help Mum with the bills. Dad never got back on his feet after that. Spent his last ten years doing security shifts at shopping centres, all that skill just sitting there while half the houses in our street still had dodgy wiring from the seventies.

I wanted to learn what he knew. Not just for the money, though the money's good if you're qualified. I wanted to build something. Every time I walked past a construction site and saw the scaffolding going up, the new flats being framed, I knew there was work there I could do if someone would just show me how.

In 2022, I finally saved enough to apply for training. Went down to North London College in Tottenham with my application for the Level 2 Electrical Installation course. The woman behind the desk looked at my forms and shook her head before I'd even finished filling them in.

"Two-year waiting list," she said. "Funding constraints from the Education and Skills Funding Agency. We can put you on the list but I wouldn't hold your breath."

Two years. For a course that takes eight months.

So I tried Haringey Council. They've got an employment team, right? Help people find work, that's what councils do. The adviser was nice enough, but after twenty minutes of clicking through her computer, she printed out a phone number.

"National Careers Service," she said. "They handle training applications now."

Called the number. Got transferred three times. Finally spoke to someone who asked me the same questions the council woman had asked, typed for five minutes, then gave me the phone number for North London College.

"They'll be able to help you with electrical courses," she said.

I told her I'd just come from there. She said she'd make a note on my file.

Tried the government apprenticeship website next. Spent hours filling out applications, uploading my CV, writing cover letters explaining why I wanted to learn the trade. Got automated rejections within days. Same reason every time: "No available levy funding for new starts."

By this point I was getting angry. Not at the people answering the phones, they were just doing their jobs. But someone, somewhere, was making decisions that meant I couldn't learn skills the whole of north London needed. Every building site I passed had signs up: "Electricians wanted. Good rates. Start immediately."

I contacted the Construction Industry Training Board directly. They run training grants, their website said. Surely they'd want to train electricians when there was work crying out for them.

The man on the phone was apologetic. "Our London allocation is fully committed," he said. "We cannot afford to run that programme this financial year. Try again in April."

This was October.

"There is no funding," he said, like that explained anything.

For months, I accepted that. It sounded reasonable. Training costs money. Workshops cost money. Tutors cost money. If there was no funding, there was no funding. Everyone told me the same thing, so it had to be true.

Then I went back to the college in March to drop off another application, hoping something might have opened up. The campus was quiet, it was a Tuesday afternoon, about two o'clock. I was walking past the construction block when I saw through the windows into the electrical workshop.

Brand new workbenches. Pristine tool sets still in their plastic wrapping. Circuit boards that looked like they'd never been touched. Everything covered in dust sheets like a furniture showroom nobody visited.

I found a tutor in the corridor, asked him why the workshop wasn't being used.

"We've got capacity for forty more students in there," he said. "Beautiful setup, isn't it? But central government won't release the training funding because of Treasury spending controls. I've had to turn away dozens of people like you this year."

He leaned against the wall, looked tired. "Maddest thing is, Enfield and Haringey councils are both desperately behind on their housing targets. Crying out for qualified electricians. But we've got empty workshops and they've got empty building plots, and somehow nobody can find the money to connect them."

That's when it clicked. The people existed, I'd met them, queuing behind me at the college, calling the same phone numbers, getting the same rejections. The workshops existed, I was looking at one. The need existed, every housing association in north London was screaming for tradesmen.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The government that prints the pounds told me it couldn't find enough pounds to train people who were standing right there, ready to work, to fill jobs that already existed, using equipment that was already bought and sitting empty.

That wasn't an accounting problem. That was a choice.

I started looking at it differently. Every time someone told me "there's no funding," I heard something else: "The government that issues the currency has chosen not to issue enough of it to connect you to this work."

The money isn't found, like treasure buried in a field. It's created, by the same institution that was telling me it didn't exist.

Now I understand what I couldn't see at the start. The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the tools were available. They were. All of them.

I'm still here, still watching. Still seeing the building sites that can't find electricians and the workshops that can't find students and the administrators who shrug and say the budget won't stretch. But I hear it differently now.

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 that they stock themselves, with currency they create themselves, following rules they wrote themselves.

The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.