Shafiq

I became a carer because I watched my mum try to look after my grandfather when his dementia got worse. She was running our family shop on Wilmslow Road during the day, then coming home to help him remember how to use the bathroom, how to eat his dinner, how to recognise us. She never complained, but I could see her getting thinner, more tired, forgetting things herself because she was carrying too much. That is when I knew this was the work I wanted to do. Not because I thought it would be easy, but because I had seen what good care could mean for a family, and what happened when there was not enough of it.

I studied Health and Social Care at Manchester Metropolitan University and got my Level 3 diploma in 2017. The tutors were brilliant, and the course covered everything: safeguarding, medication management, person-centred care, working with families. When I graduated, I felt ready. I completed my Care Certificate through Manchester Adult Education Service in 2019, passed all the modules, and started working at Sunrise Care Home in Didsbury for £8.50 an hour.

I loved the work. I was good at it. The residents trusted me, and their families would ask for me specifically when they visited. But £8.50 an hour in Manchester meant I was still living with my parents, still struggling to pay back my student loans, still watching my bank balance every week to see if I could afford to put petrol in my car to get to work. After two years, I knew I needed something better, not just for me but because I had bigger plans. I wanted to open my own care home someday, somewhere in Rusholme where I knew the families, where I could provide the kind of care my grandfather should have had.

I applied to dozens of care homes across Manchester. All of them had vacancies. All of them offered similar wages: £8.50, £9.00, £9.50 if you worked nights. It did not matter how experienced you were, how many qualifications you had, or how much the residents liked you. The pay was the same everywhere.

So I went to Manchester City Council's Adult Social Care department and asked about training grants. I wanted to do my Level 5 diploma in Leadership and Management, maybe get qualified as a care home manager. The woman behind the desk was polite but firm. "Our training budget was cut by 40% this year," she said. "We can only fund statutory training now. The courses you are talking about, there is no funding for those."

I tried the Department for Work and Pensions next, asked about apprenticeship schemes. I had heard they were funding people to train in different sectors. The adviser looked through his system for ten minutes, then shook his head. "Social care apprenticeships are not a priority sector for funding allocation," he told me. "We are focusing on manufacturing and digital skills at the moment."

At first, this sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight everywhere. Training costs money. I understood that. But then I started noticing things that did not fit with what I was being told.

I was signing on for JobSeeker's Allowance by then, because I could not afford to stay at Sunrise on those wages. During one of my appointments, my work coach mentioned that Cornerstone Care Services was looking for people to do 'work experience' placements. Unpaid, but it would count toward my job search requirements. I went to see them, and they told me they had twelve unfilled care assistant positions. Twelve jobs, sitting empty, while they were bringing in people from the JobCentre to work for free.

"Why not just hire the people doing work experience?" I asked the manager.

"We cannot afford to pay them," she said. "The council only pays us £14.50 per hour for care visits, and by the time we cover travel, uniforms, insurance, supervision, we are lucky to break even. There is no money to increase wages."

But there was money to pay for the work experience coordinator. There was money to pay for the extra paperwork, the extra supervision, the constant cycle of training new people who would leave after a few weeks because they needed actual wages. There was money for all of that, but not for paying people to do the job properly.

Then I walked past the old Manchester College annexe building on Plymouth Grove. I had trained there during my Care Certificate, so I knew what was inside: fully equipped care training suites with hospital beds, hoists, medication trolleys, everything you needed to teach people how to do this work safely. I looked through the windows and saw it all still there, covered in dust sheets. The building was locked up.

I called the college to ask what had happened. "The council could not afford the lease renewal," they told me. "The training suites are still fully functional, but we cannot run courses without funding."

That was when I started to understand what was really happening. The people existed. I was one of them. The care homes had vacancies. Cornerstone had twelve of them. The training facilities existed. I had seen them with my own eyes. The need existed. Every week, I met families in Rusholme who were struggling to find care for elderly relatives, or young adults with learning disabilities, or people recovering from hospital stays.

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

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. 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 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.

I am still here, still watching, still ready to work. What I understand now is that 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. The cupboard was never bare. It was locked.