Jayde

I've always been good with my hands. Growing up on Parson Cross, you learn to fix things yourself because no one else is coming. When I left school at 16, warehouse work seemed like the sensible choice. Steady hours, decent enough pay, nothing glamorous but it kept me and my daughter fed. Then the pandemic hit, and redundancy came with a letter that felt like the end of everything. But watching my neighbour Dave rewire his kitchen last summer, something clicked. The way he traced the circuits, tested each connection, brought power to dark corners of the room. I thought: I could do that. I could learn that. And electricians, proper ones, they earn good money. Enough to get us out of this one-bedroom flat into somewhere with a garden for my little girl.

I called Sheffield College in February 2023, excited for the first time in months. The woman on the phone sounded apologetic before I'd even finished explaining what I wanted. "The electrical installation course? I'm afraid that's suspended. Funding constraints from the CITB levy redistribution, you see. We're hoping to restart it next year." CITB, the Construction Industry Training Board. Even the name sounded official, important. I trusted her. Of course there were funding constraints. Everyone knew money was tight.

The National Careers Service sent me to a private provider in Rotherham. Kelvin Training Solutions, they called themselves. Professional website, testimonials from happy graduates, photos of modern workshops full of practice boards and electrical rigs. I paid £800 from my redundancy money as a deposit. Eight hundred pounds I could not afford to lose. Two weeks before the course started, another phone call, another apology. "Insufficient government subsidy allocation," the manager explained. "The Department for Education funding didn't come through at the levels we expected. We'll refund your deposit, of course, but the September intake is cancelled."

I went to Sheffield City Council next. Their skills team operated from a grey building near the train station, and the advisor, Sarah, genuinely seemed to want to help. She pulled up spreadsheets on her computer, scrolled through lists of providers and courses. "Construction training budgets have been centrally restricted by Treasury spending controls," she said, not meeting my eyes. "We've got housing targets from government, thousands of new homes needed, but they've told us we can't spend on the training that would create the workers to build them." The contradiction hit me like a slap. They want houses built but won't train builders. They want homes but won't create the electricians to wire them.

Walking home that day, frustrated and furious, I took the bus route that passes the old Northern College construction training centre. I'd seen it hundreds of times, a low brick building with big windows, set back from the road behind metal fencing. But this time, I got off the bus and walked up to the gate. A sign on the fence read: "Training Facility Available. Awaiting Funding Confirmation." The building was locked, silent, but through the chain-link I could see everything perfectly. Welding booths lined up in neat rows. Electrical training rigs, the exact kind I'd seen on the Kelvin Training website. Practice walls for tiling, plumbing stations, tool racks still mounted on the workshop walls. All of it gathering dust.

A security guard appeared from a little hut by the gate. "Been closed eight months now," he told me, shaking his head. "Shame, really. Place used to train sixty apprentices at a time. All the kit's still in there, good as new. Just needs someone to turn the lights back on." I asked him why it stayed closed if the equipment was fine. "Funding," he said, the same word I'd heard everywhere else. "Nobody's got the money to run it anymore."

But standing there, looking through that fence, something shifted in my head. The training rigs existed. The building existed. I existed, ready to learn. My daughter existed, needing a proper home. Dave next door existed, proving the skills could be taught. The housing waiting list existed, 13,000 families according to the council website, all needing homes that required electricians to wire them. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The government that prints the pounds, that decides what £ symbols mean, told me it couldn't find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work. Not because the materials weren't available. Not because the teachers didn't exist. Not because the electrical systems were too complicated to learn. Because of money. Pieces of paper and numbers in computers that they themselves created.

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 still walk past that training centre sometimes. The equipment's still there, waiting. The housing list keeps growing. And I keep wondering how many other people like me are being told the cupboard is bare while standing next to cupboards full of everything we need. This isn't just my story from Sheffield. It's happening in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says we can't afford to connect them.