Jerome

I've always been decent with my hands. Growing up on the Roundshaw estate, you learn to fix things yourself because calling someone costs money you don't have. When the lights went out in our kitchen, I rewired the switch myself using YouTube videos and a multimeter I borrowed from my mate's dad. When Mrs Patterson next door needed her plug socket replaced, I did that too. She said I had a proper electrician's touch, that I should get qualified. I'd been thinking the same thing for years.

My mum cleaned offices in the city, working nights so she could be home when I got back from school. My dad drove delivery vans until his back gave out when I was fourteen. I left school at sixteen to help keep us afloat, bouncing between warehouse jobs and construction sites where I learned the basics of building work. I'm thirty-one now, living in a cramped flat-share in Thornton Heath, and I was tired of scraping by on casual labour. I wanted my own place, maybe a family someday. For that, I needed proper qualifications.

In January, I walked into South Thames College with my application for their electrical installation course. The workshop looked brilliant through the windows: proper workbenches, cable runs, modern testing equipment. The admissions officer, a friendly woman called Sarah, looked over my forms and shook her head. "The course is full," she said. "There's no funding for additional places this year." I asked when the next intake would be. "Probably next September, if we get the budget allocation." That was eight months away.

I wasn't giving up. Croydon Council had skills training programmes advertised on their website, so I called their economic development team in February. The man who answered, David something, was apologetic but clear: "The budget has been cut. We're no longer running construction courses." He explained that central government funding for local skills programmes had been reduced by forty percent. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening their belts.

By July, I tried the CITB office in Croydon. The Construction Industry Training Board collects levy funding from big employers specifically for training. A helpful advisor called Karen explained their system: "We have levy funding available, but it can only be allocated to employers with existing apprenticeship agreements." I asked if there was another route. "You'd need to find an employer willing to sponsor you, then we can fund your training through them." But I was unemployed. The employers I knew weren't hiring apprentices; they were laying people off.

Then something changed my perspective completely. In September, I was walking past South Thames College on my way to sign on, and I noticed the electrical workshop was empty. It was Tuesday afternoon, what should have been peak class time. I went to reception and asked about it. The woman behind the desk looked uncomfortable. "We have twelve unfilled places on the course," she admitted, "but we can't run it without additional government funding." She showed me the workshop through the glass doors. All that equipment, sitting unused.

I stood there staring at those empty workbenches, and something didn't add up. If there was no funding, why did CITB have levy money sitting there? If the course was full, why were there twelve empty places? If there was no demand, why was I standing there desperate to start?

That same week at a job centre workshop, I met Dwayne from Streatham. He'd been trying to get on a plumbing course and hitting the same walls. "There is no funding," they kept telling him, while plumbing courses in his area ran half-empty. We started comparing notes. The excuses were identical, but they didn't make sense when you put them together.

I started asking around my estate. It turned out six of my neighbours were qualified tradespeople: two bricklayers, a plasterer, a carpenter, an electrician, and a gas engineer. All of them had been laid off when their construction firms downsized during the latest "efficiency drive." All of them were willing to teach. All of them knew exactly what skills the local building sites needed. Terry, the electrician who lives three doors down from me, put it perfectly: "I could train ten lads like you in six months, using the same workshop that's sitting empty up at the college. But they won't let me near it."

The government that prints twenty-pound notes was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to connect unemployed electricians with empty training workshops and young people who wanted to learn. The same government that had just approved a housing target for Croydon that required exactly the skills we were trying to develop. I started to understand that "there is no money" wasn't a fact. It was a choice.

I used to accept that excuse. I heard it so often it sounded like natural law, like saying water flows downhill. But the government that issues the pound was telling me it couldn't afford to spend pounds on training that would put people to work building homes that already had planning permission. 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 workshops and equipment were available – they were. Whether the housing need was real – it was.

All the pieces were there. The government chose not to connect them. That choice was dressed up in the language of fiscal responsibility, but it was still a choice. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

Now I understand what I'm looking at when I walk past that empty workshop. It's not a shortage of resources. It's a shortage of political will. And it's not just my story. It's happening in every constituency where people like me are told there's no money for the training that would put them to work doing the jobs that need doing, in a country that prints its own currency and sets its own spending priorities.