Damon

I grew up on the Alma Estate after my mum brought us here from Jamaica when I was five. She worked two cleaning jobs to keep us going, and I watched her come home exhausted every night to our two-bedroom flat where the heating hasn't worked properly for three years. The council keeps saying they'll fix it, but the repairs team was cut back and the waiting list stretches forever. My younger sister sleeps on the sofa bed in the front room, and I've been sharing with mum since I was sixteen.

I left school with decent GCSEs and went straight into labouring work. The money wasn't bad, but I wanted to learn a proper trade. Construction felt right to me. I liked working with my hands, solving problems, seeing something solid come together at the end of the day. Walking through Enfield, I'd see all these new housing developments going up and think: I want to be the one laying those bricks, wiring those homes, making them ready for families like mine. There was something about construction that felt essential. People need homes. Someone has to build them. I wanted to be that someone.

In early 2023, I applied to Enfield Council's construction apprenticeship scheme. I filled out all the forms, wrote the personal statement about why I wanted to train as a bricklayer, even got a reference from my old boss at the building site. Two months later, I got a letter back saying the programme had been cancelled. "Due to budget constraints," it said, "we are unable to run this year's construction apprenticeships. The funding has been cut."

Fair enough, I thought. Times are tight. Everyone knows that. So I tried North London College instead. They had a bricklaying course that looked perfect, Level 1 and 2 qualifications, everything I needed to get started properly. I went in for an interview and they seemed keen. Then the tutor called me back a week later. "I'm really sorry," she said, "but the CITB levy allocation for our area has been reduced. We can only take twelve students this year instead of thirty." Twelve places for the whole of North London. I wasn't one of them.

The Jobcentre Plus adviser was sympathetic but not much help. "Have you looked into private training providers?" she suggested, sliding a leaflet across her desk. I had. The fees were £3,000 upfront, which might as well have been £30,000. My mum was already working two jobs just to keep up with the bills. There was no way we could find that kind of money.

Then I heard about Barnet and Southgate College. Someone at the pub said they still had funded places on their construction courses. I spent my last tenner on train fares getting over there, sat in their waiting room for two hours, only to be told those places were reserved for Barnet residents. Postcode lottery, the admissions officer called it, like that made it any less frustrating.

I was getting desperate by then, so I rang CITB directly. It took four phone calls and three different departments before I got through to someone who could actually explain what was happening. "Look," he said, "I'll be straight with you. There is a skills shortage in construction. Massive shortage. But the training budget has been reallocated away from London boroughs due to Treasury spending controls. The money's been moved to other regions."

I asked him which regions. "Areas with lower labour costs," he said. "The Treasury wants to see value for money." I thought about that for weeks. Value for money. My mum was paying £800 a month rent for a flat with broken heating, in a borough where new luxury flats were selling for half a million pounds each. How was that value for money?

But I accepted it. Everyone was saying the same thing: there's no funding, the budget's been cut, we cannot afford to run that programme. It sounded reasonable. Governments have limited money, same as households. You can't spend what you don't have. I believed that.

Then in September, walking past Capel Manor College in Enfield, I saw something that didn't make sense. A notice board by the entrance, advertising their construction courses. Forty unfilled places, it said. Fully funded. Start date: 15th September. The date had already passed. They couldn't fill them.

I stood there staring at that notice board for ten minutes. Forty places. Fully funded. In Enfield, where I live. While I'd been told for months that there was no money for training. While I'd been sent all over North London looking for a single place on a construction course. While the housing waiting list in my borough kept growing and the luxury developments kept going up with imported workers because there weren't enough trained locals.

The people existed. I existed, along with dozens of others I'd met in Jobcentre queues and college waiting rooms. The buildings existed. The materials existed. The instructors existed. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

That's when I started to understand something different. The government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect me to this work. That choice wasn't forced on them by some natural law of economics. It was a decision. The UK government doesn't run out of pounds any more than a football referee runs out of points to award. They have the scorecard.

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'm still here on the Alma Estate. Still watching the luxury developments go up while my sister sleeps on the sofa bed. But 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. The cupboard was never bare. Someone just decided to keep it locked.