Gemma

I've always had a way with people who are struggling with memory loss. It started when I was 16 and left school to care for my grandmother who had dementia. While other teenagers were figuring out what to do with their lives, I was learning to read the signals when someone couldn't find the right words, how to stay calm when confusion turned to frustration, how to make someone feel safe when their own mind felt like a foreign country. My grandmother used to say I had gentle hands and a patient heart. After she passed, I knew this was the work I wanted to do properly.

I spent years working in various care roles across East Lancashire. I was good at it, everyone said so, but I always felt like I was operating at half my potential. I wanted the qualifications that would let me become a senior care practitioner, someone who could design care plans and train others, not just follow instructions. In 2022, I finally decided to make it happen.

My first stop was Blackpool and The Fylde College. They had exactly what I needed: a Level 3 Diploma in Adult Care. When I called to enquire, the admissions officer was apologetic but firm. "The course is oversubscribed," she said, "and funding has been cut by Lancashire County Council due to budget constraints from central government. We simply cannot take on more students this year." She made it sound inevitable, like rain or winter, something that just happened to people.

I tried East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust next. Surely the NHS would have pathways for someone like me? The healthcare assistant programme coordinator listened to my background and seemed interested until I mentioned social care. "We only have funding for clinical roles," she explained. "The government directives are very specific about what we can and cannot spend on. Social care pathways aren't covered under our current allocations." Again, that word: funding. As if pounds sterling had developed opinions about who deserved training and who didn't.

Getting frustrated but not defeated, I went directly to Hyndburn Borough Council. If anyone would understand the local need for qualified care workers, it would be them. The adult services team manager invited me in for a proper conversation. She knew my work, knew the gaps we were trying to fill in local provision. "You're exactly what we need," she said, "but our commissioning budget has been capped by the Department of Health and Social Care. We cannot afford to run that programme. The central government grants just don't stretch to new training places." There it was again: cannot afford. As if the government that prints the money had run out of ink.

My last hope was Accrington and Rossendale College, practically on my doorstep. The careers advisor was more honest than the others. "We mothballed our care training facility in 2021," she admitted. "There simply isn't the government funding to make it viable. The classrooms are still there, the equipment is still there, but we can't justify running courses that the state won't fund."

That afternoon, walking past the locked college building, I stopped and looked through the windows. The simulation rooms were fully equipped: hospital beds with working monitors, wheelchair access training areas, medication management stations. Everything a person would need to learn proper care techniques. The dust on the surfaces told the story of political choices made in distant offices.

It was then I realized that my neighbor Sarah could easily fill one of those empty training places. She had years of care experience before the local care home closed down last year. She was unemployed now, not through choice but because the care sector had been systematically defunded. Sarah had the experience, I had the motivation, the college had the facility. The only missing ingredient was the political will to connect us to the work that needed doing.

Standing there, looking at those empty rooms, something clicked. Every person who had told me "there is no money" was applying household logic to a government that issues its own currency. When my household budget is tight, I genuinely cannot afford new shoes because I do not have a money-printing machine in my spare room. But when HM Treasury says it cannot afford to train care workers, that is a different kind of statement entirely. The government that creates pounds was telling me it could not find enough pounds to connect willing workers to desperate need.

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 am still here, still watching, still ready to learn. But now I understand this is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where skilled people and urgent needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never the problem. The problem was the decision not to fill it.