Dwayne

Dwayne did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across London as you listen. This is their story. Construction training places sit empty in Streatham and Croydon North while the housing shortage deepens and skilled workers remain unemployed. Dwayne's experience shows how Treasury spending rules block the connection between people ready to learn, facilities ready to teach, and communities that need homes built. My name is Dwayne and I've always been good with my hands. Growing up on a Croydon council estate, I spent weekends helping my uncle Tony with his roofing crew from the time I was fourteen. He taught me to read a spirit level, how to carry tiles without breaking them, how to work safely at height. When I left school at sixteen, it felt natural to keep working with him. The pay was decent, the work was honest, and I was learning a proper trade. Tony retired three years ago and suddenly I was on my own, picking up cash-in-hand jobs wherever I could find them. No qualifications on paper, no real prospects. When Maya told me she was pregnant last year, I knew I had to sort myself out properly. I wanted to be the kind of father who could provide for his family, who had skills employers actually valued. I'd always planned to get my construction qualifications eventually. Now eventually had arrived. I went to Croydon Council's housing department in February 2023. I'd been reading about the borough's housing shortage and thought they might know about training opportunities. The woman behind the desk was helpful enough. She said I should contact the Construction Industry Training Board directly. "They handle all the apprenticeships and courses," she told me. "CITB, that's who you want to speak to." So I called CITB's London office the next day. The advisor I spoke to sounded tired before I'd even finished explaining what I wanted. "I'm sorry," she said, "but our apprenticeship levy funding has been reallocated to priority areas. We're not taking new applications for London-based training at the moment." Priority areas. I asked what that meant. She said it was regions where construction skills were most needed. I mentioned the housing targets in Croydon, the developments going up everywhere around me. Surely that counted as need. "You could try South Thames College," she said. "They run their own courses." South Thames College's construction department was my next call. The receptionist put me through to someone called Dave who ran the bricklaying courses. "We've got excellent facilities," Dave said. "Brand new workshop, all the latest equipment. But we don't have funding for unemployed residents at the moment." I asked what that meant. He explained that the college could train people if their employers were paying, or if they qualified for certain government schemes. But those schemes had been cut. "Try the Jobcentre," he suggested. "They might have something." The Jobcentre Plus office in Croydon was my next stop. I explained my situation to the advisor, a woman called Sarah who seemed genuinely sorry to disappoint me. "Construction training isn't available under current funding streams," she said. "There is no funding for non-essential skills." Non-essential skills. I asked her about the housing shortage, about all the building work I could see happening around the borough. How was construction non-essential when everywhere you looked, someone was building something? "The budget has been cut," she said simply. "I wish I could help, but those programmes just aren't running anymore." That evening, I walked past South Thames College on my way home. It was about seven o'clock, still light. I could see into the construction workshop through the ground floor windows. There it was, exactly as Dave had described: rows of brand new bricklaying stations, mixers, tools laid out neatly on benches. The whole place was completely empty. Lights off, no one working, no one learning. I stood there looking at it for ten minutes. A security guard came out for his evening round and we got talking. Nice bloke called Frank, been working there for five years. "Shame, isn't it?" he said, nodding towards the workshop. "They had to turn away dozens of applicants this month. No money for new starts, they keep saying. But look at it. Sits empty most days." I asked him how often the workshop was actually used. He shrugged. "Maybe three hours a day when they do have a course running. Rest of the time, it's just sitting there. All that equipment, doing nothing." The following week I met Jerome at a community centre in Lewisham East. He'd been trying to get electrical training for eight months, hitting the same walls I'd been hitting. Same story everywhere: courses existed, facilities existed, but the funding had been cut. Jerome knew guys in Bermondsey, Southwark, Greenwich, all looking for construction training, all being told the same thing. "There is no money," Jerome said, doing a perfect impression of every administrator we'd both spoken to. "That's their answer to everything." But I kept thinking about that empty workshop. The equipment was there. The teachers were there. People like me and Jerome were there, ready to learn. What exactly was it that there was no money for? I used to accept that excuse. It sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight, tough choices have to be made, we all have to live within our means. Everyone accepts it. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. The government that prints the twenty pound notes in my wallet told me it could not find enough of those same notes to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. The building existed. The teachers existed. The tools existed. The only thing that did not exist was the decision to put them together. I started to wonder: if the people exist, and the building exists, and the need exists, what exactly is it that "there is no money" for? The government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect these people to this work. That is a political decision dressed as an accounting problem. I'm still here, still watching. Maya's due in three months and I'm still picking up cash work when I can find it. But I understand something now that I did not understand when I first walked into that council office. The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It is the same logic as a household that says "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. What happened to me is happening to people across London right now. In every constituency where workers exist and training places exist and housing need exists, while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. They just decided not to open it. What Dwayne experienced has a name: Cherry Picking. Imagine someone arguing that swimming is dangerous by citing only shark attacks while ignoring the millions of people who swim safely every day. That is cherry picking: selecting rare negative examples to justify avoiding something entirely, while ignoring overwhelming evidence of success. When Dwayne was told construction training had no funding, administrators were applying household logic to a currency issuer. They cited the occasional failed housing project or training scheme that did not deliver perfect results. They ignored Vienna's century of successful council housing, Singapore's comprehensive public building programme, and the fact that every major British city built homes successfully at scale until the 1980s. The objection "other councils tried building housing and it failed" treats selective examples as universal proof. Selective examples prove nothing. Vienna, Singapore, and every major UK city until 1980 built council housing successfully at scale. The question is what conditions make it work, not whether it has ever failed somewhere. In Dwayne's case, the cherry picking worked like this: somewhere, a construction training programme had overspent or produced graduates who did not find work immediately. That rare example became the excuse to cut funding everywhere, even in areas with acute housing need and empty training facilities. The UK government issues its own currency. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The real constraint is resources: people, skills, materials, time. And in Streatham and Croydon North, those resources were sitting idle. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Streatham and Croydon North ranks 196 out of 543 English constituencies on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025. The constituency has 1472 registered charities and received £50.8 million in total grants. All sources are published at Blocked Britain dot Co dot UK. Blocked Britain tells the stories of people whose lives are shaped by the gap between what Britain needs and what its institutions choose to provide. Every character is fictional. Every situation is drawn from official statistics. Produced by Blocked Britain.