Komal

I grew up in Barking watching my dad build things. He was a proper tradesman, working construction sites across East London until his back gave out when I was fifteen. Had to switch to security work after that, standing in shopping centres instead of building them. But he always said construction was good honest work, something you could be proud of. When I finished college and spent three years managing a clothing store, I kept thinking about what he said. Retail felt temporary, like I was just moving things around that other people had made. I wanted to build something that lasted.

By early 2023, it seemed like the perfect time. New housing estates were going up everywhere around Barking, cranes on every street corner, developers putting up signs about hundreds of new homes. The demand was obviously there. I decided I wanted to train as an electrician. Every new home needs wiring, and I figured that was solid work that would always be needed.

I contacted Barking and Dagenham College first, excited to start. The admissions officer was friendly enough, but she told me the electrical installation course was oversubscribed. "We'd love to take you," she said, "but there is no funding for additional places." I asked when the next intake would be, thinking maybe I could wait a few months. She said the funding situation wasn't improving, and they couldn't guarantee any places for the following year either.

I tried Greenwich Community College next. Same story. The admissions team said they'd had their training budgets cut and could not take on new students. When I asked why, they explained that government funding for further education had been reduced across London. "Unfortunately, we cannot afford to run that programme at the level we used to," the course coordinator told me. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was having to tighten their belts, right?

Determined not to give up, I contacted the Construction Industry Training Board directly. I explained that I lived in an area with massive housing development, that there was obvious demand for electricians, that I was ready to commit to the training. The CITB advisor was sympathetic but told me something that made my head spin. Levy funding had been reduced for London providers because Treasury spending rules meant they had to treat training investment as a deficit risk rather than economic stimulus. They couldn't spend money training electricians because spending money was seen as creating debt, even though not training electricians meant houses would take longer to build and cost more.

That's when I started looking at private training providers. I contacted three different companies in East London. Each one quoted fees between £3,000 and £5,000. One was helpful enough to break it down: that was just for the basic electrical installation qualification, not including the additional certifications I'd need to work on building sites. The total cost would be closer to £8,000. On retail wages, that might as well have been £80,000.

At this point I was frustrated, but I still accepted what I was being told. The funding had been cut, the budgets were tight, the government couldn't afford to train as many people. It sounded like a fact, something fixed and unavoidable, like the weather.

Then I started noticing things that didn't add up.

Walking past Barking and Dagenham College one evening, I could see through the windows into the construction workshops. Brand new electrical training rigs, the kind that simulate house wiring systems, sitting completely unused. Workbenches with tool kits laid out like they were waiting for students who never came. The security guard was outside having a cigarette, and I asked him about it. He said half the spaces in the electrical programme were unfilled. Not because they couldn't find students, but because they couldn't fund more places. The tools were there, the workshop was there, the instructors were there, but some rule meant they couldn't put students and equipment together.

I started paying attention to conversations in the area. At the bus stop, in the shops, people talking about work. I met three other people within two streets of where I live who wanted exactly the same thing: electrical training so they could work on the housing developments going up around us. All of them had been told the same thing by the same institutions. No funding. Budget cuts. Cannot afford it.

The building that used to house the East London Construction Skills Centre had been locked up for months. I'd walk past it on my way to work and see the sign still up, advertising courses that no longer ran. The building was fine, just empty. Another security guard told me it had been mothballed because the funding had been withdrawn, but the lease still had two years to run. So we were paying rent on an empty building rather than paying the same money to run training courses in it.

That's when I started to understand that what I was hearing wasn't a fact. It was a choice.

The government that prints the pound notes told me it couldn't find enough of them to train people who were standing ready to work. But I could see with my own eyes that the people existed, the buildings existed, the equipment existed, the demand existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The pounds themselves? The government issues those. The instructors? They were still employed, just sitting idle. The equipment? Already bought and installed.

I used to accept the excuse that there was no money. I hear it differently now. The government that mints the coins told me it couldn't afford to put people in workshops that already existed to learn skills that builders were crying out for. 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 wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's the same logic as a household saying "we cannot afford it," except a household doesn't issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it on training the people who were ready to build the homes that already had planning permission.

I'm still here, still watching, still waiting. But now I understand that my story isn't unique to Barking or to construction training. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. Someone just decided to keep it locked.