Malik

My dad always said I had good hands. Growing up in Finchley, I'd watch him work on the car in our tiny front yard, his Pakistani father's precision mixed with twenty years of fixing London's problems one fare at a time. When I started helping neighbors with odd decorating jobs after sixth form, I discovered plastering came naturally to me. There's something satisfying about taking a rough wall and making it smooth, ready for someone to call home.

I was meant to go to university, but when Dad had his heart attack in 2022, everything changed. Mum couldn't manage on her teaching assistant wages alone, so I stayed home and took whatever work I could find. The construction jobs paid better than anything else, and I was good at them. I started thinking seriously about training properly, maybe becoming a qualified tradesperson instead of just picking up casual work.

The Construction Industry Training Board seemed like the obvious first stop. I walked into their London office in September 2022, confident I'd found my path. The advisor was friendly enough, but after looking through her system for ten minutes, she shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said. "All our funded apprenticeship places are full, and we've got a two-year waiting list." Two years. I asked if there was anything else, any other route. She suggested I try the local colleges.

North London College had a good reputation for construction courses. The admissions officer, a woman in her fifties who'd clearly had this conversation many times before, explained the situation patiently. "We'd love to have you on the course," she said. "You've got the right attitude and clearly some experience already. But our CITB funding has been cut, so we can only offer unfunded places now." Four thousand pounds a year. I did the math in my head, more than Dad earned in some months even before the heart attack.

Barnet and Southgate College was my next try. Same story, different building. The careers advisor, a younger man who seemed genuinely frustrated by what he was telling me, spread his hands apologetically. "There is no funding," he said. "We'd love to have you, but there's just no budget for new apprenticeships this year. Treasury's tightened everything up."

I started approaching construction firms directly. My thinking was simple: if the training providers couldn't help, maybe I could convince an employer to take me on and train me as they went. The first firm, a small outfit doing extensions in North London, was honest about it. "Look, son," the site manager told me, "we can't take on apprentices without government funding support. The paperwork alone costs us more than we can afford, and without the subsidies, training you properly would put us under." The second firm said the same thing. So did the third.

By early 2023, I was getting desperate. That's when someone mentioned the Tottenham Construction Skills Centre. I'd never heard of it, but it was worth a try. I took the bus over there on a Thursday morning, expecting another closed door.

What I found instead made no sense at all. The building was huge, clearly designed for serious training. But half the workshop spaces were empty. Not just empty, visibly unused, with dust on the workbenches and tools that looked like they hadn't been picked up in months. The coordinator, a woman who'd clearly been in construction longer than I'd been alive, walked me around with a mixture of pride and frustration.

"We've got capacity for sixty apprentices," she told me. "Right now we're running thirty unfilled training places because Treasury won't release the CITB levy funds to areas like ours, even though we're surrounded by housing developments crying out for skilled workers." She gestured toward the window. In the distance, I could see cranes and scaffolding, the skeleton of new developments that seemed to be taking forever to finish.

Walking home that afternoon, I started noticing things I'd somehow missed before. The new housing estate on the High Road had been sitting half-finished for months. There were signs up: "Seeking qualified tradespeople." But there were also people I knew, Gary from down the road who'd done roofing work before he got laid off, Dennis who used to do electrical work until his firm folded, Sarah who'd done plumbing before having her kids, all of them unemployed, all of them with skills that these building sites desperately needed.

I used to accept it when people said "there is no funding." It sounded reasonable, like an unfortunate fact of life. Everyone accepted it. But standing there looking at empty training workshops and half-built houses and unemployed skilled workers all within a few miles of each other, I started wondering what exactly there was "no money" for. The people existed. The buildings existed. The need existed. The training facilities existed.

The government that prints the notes and mints the coins was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to connect these things together. But it wasn't really about money, was it? It was about choice. Someone in Westminster had decided that keeping the government's books looking tidy was more important than putting people to work building homes that London desperately needed.

I hear those excuses differently now. When someone says "there is no funding," I think about those empty workshops in Tottenham and the half-finished buildings and the skilled workers sitting at home. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, they did. Whether the skills could be taught, they could. Whether the materials and facilities were available, they were.

The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a political choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The government that issues its own currency told me it couldn't afford to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. But it's the same logic as a household saying "we cannot afford it," except a household doesn't print its own money. The government does.

I'm still here, still watching, still waiting for someone to explain why connecting unemployed people to unfilled training places to unfinished housing developments is financially impossible in a country that creates its own currency. I understand now that this isn't just my story. Walk through any constituency in Britain and you'll find the same pattern: the work that needs doing, the people who could do it, and the institutions that say they can't afford to bring them together. The cupboard isn't bare. Someone just decided not to open it.