Jerome

I grew up watching the buses from our council flat window in Edmonton, timing their arrivals against my mum's shift patterns. She cleaned offices in Central London through the night, catching the first bus at 5:30 AM, home by 7:00 if the connections worked. When they didn't, she'd be stranded at Tottenham Hale for twenty minutes, watching empty buses headed elsewhere. I started mapping those gaps when I was fourteen, sketching out where the routes failed and where they could connect better.

By sixteen, I could tell you every transport link from Enfield to Zone 1, which stops had step-free access, where the night bus routes overlapped with the day services. My mates thought it was weird, but I saw patterns everywhere: how a single delayed train at Liverpool Street could ripple backwards through the network for hours, why the 191 bus always ran late on Fridays but never Tuesdays. It felt like understanding the heartbeat of the city.

When I heard about Transport for London's apprenticeship schemes, it seemed perfect. They needed people who understood passenger flow, route optimization, accessibility planning. I understood all of that instinctively. I applied in March 2019, got through to the interview stage, then received a standard email: "Due to reduced funding allocations, we have fewer places available this year." I tried again six months later. Same result. The woman on the phone was apologetic but clear: "The budget has been cut. We simply cannot afford to run the programme at previous levels."

I thought that was reasonable. Budgets get tight, priorities shift. I started looking elsewhere.

Enfield Council's transport planning department seemed like another option. The manager, Sarah Chen, actually invited me in for a chat after I sent her my route analysis for the A10 corridor. She spread my sketches across her desk, nodding as I explained how three simple timing changes could reduce passenger waiting times by an average of eight minutes. "This is exactly the kind of thinking we need," she said. "But I have to be honest with you, Jerome. The budget simply isn't there for new positions. We've had a recruitment freeze for eighteen months."

I enrolled in evening classes at Enfield College instead, studying transport planning part-time while working warehouse shifts during the day. The course was brilliant: proper software for route modelling, sessions with practicing transport engineers, field trips to analyze junction efficiency. Then in January, our tutor called us all together. "I'm sorry to tell you that this course will not continue after Easter. Student funding cuts have made it unviable to run."

Network Rail was my next attempt. I knew I didn't have a degree, but I thought my practical understanding might count for something. The recruitment officer was surprisingly interested until she checked the budget guidelines. "We'd love to take you on, but we simply cannot justify the training costs in the current financial climate. Corporate learning and development has been significantly reduced."

That phrase kept appearing: "cannot afford", "budget cuts", "funding reduced". It sounded like basic financial management. Organisations have limited resources; they have to make choices. I accepted it completely until I walked past the old Enfield Technical College one evening in March.

The building was still there, obviously. But it was empty, locked up, with planning notices stuck to the windows. Through the ground floor windows, I could see the transport simulation lab still set up: computer terminals arranged around a central display screen, route planning software still loaded on the monitors, the kind of equipment I'd only seen in YouTube videos of professional transport planning centres. Everything was there. The desks, the technology, even the wall charts showing London's transport zones. Just sitting unused.

That same week, I was signing on at the job centre and I started really looking at who else was there. Marcus from two floors up in my block, who'd worked on the Crossrail electrical systems until those contracts finished. An older woman called Denise who'd been a project manager on the Northern Line extension before she was made redundant. A young guy called Ahmed who'd just completed a civil engineering degree but couldn't find work. At least fifteen people with exactly the skills you'd need to build and operate transport infrastructure, all collecting Universal Credit, all available to start work immediately.

I started adding it up. The people existed. The skills existed. The training facilities existed. The need certainly existed – anyone who'd tried to get from Enfield to anywhere else during rush hour knew the transport links were inadequate. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The government that prints the pounds told me it could not find enough of them to connect people who wanted to work with work that needed doing. But the pounds are just tokens. The real question was whether the people existed – they did. Whether the skills could be taught – they could be. Whether the equipment was available – it was, sitting locked in an empty building. Whether the materials existed to build better transport links – steel, concrete, electronics, all produced right here in the UK.

I used to accept that "there was no money" meant the same thing as "we cannot afford it" in a household. I hear it differently now. When my mum says we can't afford something, she means she doesn't have enough pounds in her account, and she can't create more. When the government says it cannot afford something, it means it chooses not to create the pounds that would pay for it. The government issues the currency. It doesn't need to find pounds before it spends them.

The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. Every time someone told me "the budget has been cut," they were making a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. They chose not to connect the idle training facility with the unemployed engineers. They chose not to fund the apprenticeships that would have matched people ready to work with work that needed doing.

I'm still here, still watching the buses, still mapping the connections that could exist. But I understand now that what happened to me 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. It was just locked.