Jermaine

I grew up on the Hattersley estate in Tameside, watching my dad come home every night covered in brick dust and cement. He worked the building sites across Manchester, good honest work, but always as a labourer. Never qualified, never trained, always the one carrying the bags while someone else wired the houses. I left school at 16 and followed him onto the sites. I was good with my hands, picked things up fast, but I was still just the muscle. The electricians, the proper trades, they had something I wanted. They had papers that said they knew what they were doing.

For five years, I applied to Manchester College three times. Three times they told me the same thing: apprenticeship places were full, or the funding had been cut. Always next year. Always try again. I kept working the sites, kept saving what I could, kept thinking this would be the year. My partner Sarah was pregnant with our first, and we were sharing a flat in Denton that was too small even for two of us. I wanted to get qualified so I could earn proper money, get us somewhere decent to live.

The third time Manchester College turned me down, they gave me a number for the Construction Industry Training Board offices in Manchester. I went down there on a Wednesday morning, sat across from an advisor who looked through my application and nodded like she understood. "You've got good site experience," she said. "The problem is, levy funding is being redirected to other regions due to budget constraints from Treasury. We simply don't have the allocation for new places this year."

Budget constraints from Treasury. That was how she put it. Made it sound like a fact of nature, like rainfall or the tide. I accepted it. Why wouldn't I? These were the people who ran the training. If they said there was no money, there was no money.

I tried the private training providers next. They had places, alright. Four thousand pounds for a Level 2 electrical installation course. Four thousand pounds I didn't have and couldn't borrow. Sarah was on maternity leave by then, and we were struggling to pay rent on what I was making. The training provider gave me a leaflet about payment plans, but the numbers didn't add up. Not on a labourer's wage.

Two years passed. Sarah had our second, and the flat got even smaller. I was still applying, still being told the same thing. Then, in early 2023, Tameside College called. They had a place on a Level 2 course starting in September. Government funding had come through. I couldn't believe it. I handed in my notice at the site, told Sarah we were finally going to get somewhere. Started buying books, measuring tools, a proper electrician's multimeter. The course was going to run for eighteen months. By Christmas 2024, I'd have my Level 2. By 2025, I could start my own jobs.

Two weeks before the course started, they called again. The woman from the college sounded embarrassed. "Government funding allocations have been reduced," she said. "We have to cancel the September intake. You're welcome to apply again next year."

Government funding allocations have been reduced. The exact same phrase the CITB advisor had used three years earlier. I asked her what that meant, exactly. "Treasury has cut our allocation," she said. "There is no funding for the full cohort."

I walked down to Tameside College the next week, just to see the place. They let me look around the construction workshop. Twenty workbenches set up for electrical training. Proper test equipment, cable runs, distribution boards, everything you'd need to learn on. All of it under dust sheets. The tools were there. The benches were there. The room was there. But there was no funding.

That's when I started to see the contradiction. I walked home through Denton, past my neighbor Tariq's house. Tariq had been a qualified electrician in Syria before he came here. He'd shown me his certificates, his portfolio of work. Beautiful stuff. Hotels, hospitals, places where you can't afford to get the wiring wrong. But his qualifications weren't recognized here. He'd been trying for two years to get onto a course that would convert his credentials. Same answer every time: no places, no funding. So he stacked shelves at the Tesco on Hyde Road while I carried bags on building sites, both of us wanting to do the same work, both of us blocked by the same excuse.

The building sites I worked on were desperate for electricians. The main contractor on a housing development in Droylsden was flying guys up from London because he couldn't find qualified local labour. Flying them up and paying their accommodation. That was cheaper, apparently, than training the people who already lived here.

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 workshop at Tameside College wasn't missing. Tariq's experience wasn't missing. My willingness to learn wasn't missing. The housing developments that needed electricians weren't missing. The only thing that was missing was the decision to connect them. Someone in Westminster looked at all these pieces and chose not to put them together. They called it a budget problem. But a budget is just a plan. The government that issues the currency chose to plan for me to keep carrying bags while the workshops gathered dust.

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'm still here, still watching. Still seeing the contractors bring workers in from other regions while local people like me get told there's no training available. Still seeing qualified people like Tariq stacking shelves while the sites go short-handed. I understand now that this isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare.