Dilshan

I became a transport planner because of my grandmother's knees. She lived in a high-rise near Stonebridge Park station, and when the lift broke, which was most months, she couldn't get down to street level. I'd watch her calculating whether the shopping trip was worth the pain of climbing eight flights of stairs. That lift stayed broken for years. Someone, somewhere, had decided it wasn't worth fixing. I wanted to be the person who made different decisions.

I trained as a civil engineer at Brunel, spent my twenties designing luxury developments in central London. Glass towers for people who'd never wait for a bus. The work paid well, but every night I'd ride the Tube home and see the gaps in the system. The stations without lifts, the step changes that turned every journey into an obstacle course for anyone with mobility issues, the suburban areas where buses came twice an hour if you were lucky. I switched to transport planning in 2019, joining Transport for London as a junior. Finally, I thought, I could work on the things that mattered.

I started with step-free access at suburban stations. Spent weeks on detailed proposals for lift installations at places like Alperton and South Kenton. The engineering was straightforward, the need was obvious. I submitted my first batch to TfL's capital planning team in early 2020. The response came back within a month: "There's no budget for non-essential upgrades. These projects do not meet current investment criteria." Non-essential. I thought about my grandmother climbing those stairs.

I tried again with different stations, smaller interventions. Platform extensions to accommodate longer trains, better lighting at bus stops, tactile paving for visually impaired passengers. Same response every time. "Budget constraints require us to prioritize revenue-generating improvements." "Current spending guidelines prohibit speculative accessibility work." Always the same refrain: no money, no budget, priorities elsewhere.

By 2021, I was ready for something smaller-scale. Brent Council advertised for transport planners, and I thought local government might be more responsive to local needs. My first project was a feasibility study for improved bus connections between Wembley Central and the estates in the north of the constituency. Nothing ambitious, just filling in the gaps where people had to walk twenty minutes to catch a bus going in the wrong direction before transferring to one going where they actually needed to go.

I pitched it to the director of regeneration in March 2021. She listened politely, nodded at the right moments, then delivered the verdict: "The Department for Transport allocation has been cut again this year. We simply can't afford preliminary studies for new routes." She showed me the spreadsheet. Column after column of cancelled projects, postponed maintenance, deferred improvements. The numbers looked final, unchangeable, like weather reports.

I decided to go straight to the source. If the Department for Transport controlled the funding, maybe they'd see the logic of small, targeted improvements in areas that needed them most. I spent weeks preparing a submission: detailed proposals for accessible transport links throughout Brent East, complete with cost estimates, passenger flow projections, and economic impact assessments. Professional, thorough, everything they could want to make a decision.

The response came from a civil servant in the regional transport team: "Treasury spending rules require us to prioritize schemes with proven economic returns. Funding simply isn't available for speculative projects of this nature." Speculative. As though connecting people to jobs and services was some kind of gamble.

That's when I started to notice the contradictions. Walking to work one morning, I passed the old Brent Cross Training Centre. It had been closed for two years, but the car park was full of construction vehicles. Not abandoned, not rusted, just sitting there. I asked the security guard what was going on. He told me dozens of transport engineers had been laid off when government contracts were cancelled. "Proper skilled lads," he said. "Knew signalling, knew track work, knew accessibility systems inside out. Just no work for them to do."

The same week, I was at the job centre in Harlesden, helping a friend with some paperwork. I got talking to two signalling technicians who'd been unemployed for eight months. They'd been promised places on a retraining programme, updated skills for the new digital systems, but every start date got pushed back. "Budget constraints," they were told. "The funding's been delayed again." Meanwhile, they were sitting there, ready to work, ready to learn, drawing benefits instead of building the transport infrastructure London desperately needed.

That's when it clicked. The resources existed. The people existed. The skills existed. The construction vehicles were parked in that lot, not broken down, not impossible to repair, just waiting for someone to say "start the engines." The engineers were signing on at the job centre, not because they'd forgotten how to read a track diagram, but because someone had decided their expertise wasn't worth paying for.

I started to hear the phrase "there's no money" differently. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins was telling me it couldn't 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.

I used to accept the excuse that there was no funding. It sounded reasonable. Responsible, even. Of course you can't spend money you don't have. Except the government isn't a household saving up for a holiday. It issues the currency. It doesn't need to find pounds before it spends them. The constraint isn't the money supply; it's the real resources: people, skills, materials, time.

And in my constituency, those resources were sitting idle while someone in Westminster insisted the cupboard was bare. The unemployed engineers, the empty training centres, the broken lifts, the missing bus routes, all existing side by side while officials repeated the same impossible logic: we can't afford to connect the people who want to work with the work that needs doing.

I'm still here, still watching, still documenting every contradiction. Because this isn't just my story, or my grandmother's story, or the story of two unemployed signalling technicians in Harlesden. It's the story of every constituency where needs and resources exist side by side while someone with the power to connect them chooses not to, then calls that choice a law of economics instead of what it really is: a political decision dressed up as an accounting problem.