Leona

I grew up in King's Cross before the glass towers arrived, back when it was still railway yards and council flats. My mum cleaned offices for twenty-three years, always leaving before dawn to catch the early shift at minimum wage. I'd watch her iron her uniform in our tiny kitchen and wonder why the people who built those gleaming offices never seemed to live anywhere near them.

I left school at sixteen and drifted through retail jobs for years, but I was always drawn to building sites. Something about watching a structure come together from nothing fascinated me. During lunch breaks, I'd stand at the fence watching the cranes and scaffolding, trying to figure out how the electricians knew exactly where to thread the cables through the walls before the plaster went up. When I finally got my CSCS card through evening classes at twenty-nine, it felt like I'd found my direction. Construction made sense to me in a way that folding jumpers never had.

In early 2023, I decided to go for it properly. Camden Council had just approved 2,400 new homes across the borough, and I knew every single one would need wiring. I applied to the Construction Industry Training Board for an electrical apprenticeship, convinced this was my moment. The response came back within two weeks: "Funding priorities have shifted to infrastructure projects outside London." No explanation of what those projects were, or why London didn't count as infrastructure.

I tried City and Islington College next. They had been running electrical courses for decades, and their website still showed photos of students working with the latest equipment. But when I called, the admissions officer told me, "Our construction courses are oversubscribed and we have no budget for additional places." I asked how many people were on the waiting list. She said she couldn't give me that information, but suggested I try again next year when "funding might be different."

Next, I contacted three private training providers I found online. The first told me, "Government funding streams have been reduced and we can only take students who can pay the full fee upfront." That was £8,000 I didn't have. The second said their electrical program had been "suspended indefinitely due to budget constraints." The third didn't even return my calls.

Getting desperate, I went straight to Camden Council's housing department. I walked into their offices on Judd Street and asked to speak to someone about the 2,400 approved homes. How exactly were they planning to find electricians to wire them? The housing officer, a tired-looking woman in her fifties, was surprisingly honest. "Skills shortages are delaying multiple developments," she admitted. "We have planning permission, we have contractors lined up, but they can't find qualified electricians. It's becoming a real problem."

I told her I was an electrician trying to get qualified, and she looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. "Have you tried the college?" she asked. I explained that I had tried everyone, and everyone had told me there was no funding. She shrugged. "There is no funding," she said, as if that explained everything. "The budget has been cut."

For months, I accepted that. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was saying the same thing. There is no money. The budget has been cut. Austerity. I told myself I'd have to wait, maybe try again next year when things improved.

But walking past City and Islington College one evening in November, I noticed something odd. The construction workshop that used to buzz with activity was completely dark. Not just closed for the day, but dark in a way that suggested it had been closed for weeks. I asked the security guard about it.

"Half the building's been empty since the funding cuts," he told me. "Those training bays used to run three full courses a week. Now they're just sitting there with all that expensive equipment gathering dust. Shame, really. Beautiful kit, some of it barely used."

I stared through the window at rows of workbenches, electrical panels, and cable-laying equipment that could train dozens of electricians. Everything was there. The space, the tools, the instructors who had been made redundant but were still living in London, still available to teach. And outside, Camden Council was struggling to find electricians for 2,400 homes that already had planning permission.

That was when something clicked. I started asking different questions. If the people existed, and I was living proof they did, and if the buildings existed, and if the equipment existed, and if the need existed, then what exactly was it that "there is no money" for? The government that prints the pounds and issues the coins was telling me it could not find enough of them to connect available people to available training spaces to meet a documented need.

I realized 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. Standing right there in North London, ready to be connected.

The excuse was not a fact about the world. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When Camden Council said "there is no funding," they meant someone in Westminster had decided not to spend money on training electricians, even though the homes were approved, the training centre was available, and people like me were queuing up to learn.

It is the same logic as a household saying "we cannot afford it," except a household does not 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 am still here, still watching. I work agency construction now, learning what I can on site, but I understand something I did not understand when I started. What happened to me was not bad luck or unfortunate timing. It was a series of political choices made by people who had alternatives.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins told me it could not find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work. Every time I walk past another housing development that is months behind schedule, I know it is not because electricians do not exist in London. It is because someone decided not to train us.

This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare, even as they hold the key to the mint.