Aminah

I grew up in King's Cross when it was still rough, before the developers moved in. My grandmother had a stroke when I was fifteen, and I watched her struggle to find decent care. The system failed her in ways that made me angry, but also made me want to do something about it. That's why I trained as a support worker in my twenties. I spent years working in residential homes across North London, and I was good at it. I knew how to talk to people who were scared, how to help them keep their dignity when everything else was falling apart. Then I had my daughter, and everything changed.

Being a single mum meant I had to step back from care work. The shifts were long, the pay was never enough, and childcare costs ate up most of what I earned. But two years ago, when she started school, I decided it was time to go back. The sector was crying out for people, everyone said so. How hard could it be?

I started with Islington Council's adult social care team. I called them up, explained my background, said I was ready to retrain if needed. The woman I spoke to sounded tired. "I'm sorry," she said, "but we're restructuring services due to budget pressures. We cannot afford to run training programmes right now." She suggested I try elsewhere, but her voice had that defeated tone I remembered from the care homes. People who wanted to help but had been told the cupboard was bare.

So I tried Age UK Islington. I'd seen their posters around the neighbourhood, advertising care training courses. But when I called, they told me the programme had been suspended. "Central government funding was cut last year," the coordinator explained. "There is no funding for new places until at least next April, and even then, we're not sure." Another door closing with the same excuse.

I walked down to Fairbridge Road and tried the Jewish Care centre. They were friendly, more hopeful. They did have vacancies, they said, and they'd love to have someone with my experience. But when we talked about wages, the manager's face fell. "The problem is the council rate," she explained. "They cap what we can charge per hour of care, and it's nowhere near what we need to pay decent wages. We're competing with retail jobs that pay more and don't require you to deal with people's most difficult moments." She showed me the figures on her screen. The hourly rate the council would pay barely covered the minimum wage, let alone the London Living Wage that you needed to actually survive in Islington.

That's when I started noticing things that didn't add up. Walking down Upper Street, I passed the old Learning and Skills Council building. It was empty, "To Let" signs plastered across the windows. I remembered when it used to run care qualifications, when people from all over North London would come there to train. The building was still there. The classrooms were still there. But apparently, there was no money to use them.

At the job centre, I met three other women from my estate. We ended up talking while we waited, and it turned out we were all in the same boat. Sandra had worked in care for ten years before her husband left and she couldn't make the numbers work anymore. Janet had been a care assistant until her mum got ill and she had to choose between looking after other people's relatives and looking after her own. Priya had just finished a care qualification but couldn't find work that paid enough to cover her daughter's after-school club.

The advisor called us over to his desk and showed us his screen. It was full of care vacancies across Islington. Dozens of them. Residential homes, domiciliary care, day centres. All desperate for staff. "The problem," he said, pulling up the pay rates, "is that they're all offering wages below the London Living Wage. The councils just don't have the money to pay proper rates."

I stared at that screen and something clicked. Here we were, four women with care experience, all wanting to work, all living in the same borough where care homes couldn't fill their vacancies. The people existed. The jobs existed. The need certainly existed, you only had to look at the waiting lists. But apparently, connecting these things together was impossible because there was no money.

Except that didn't make sense, did it? The government that prints the notes and mints the coins was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to pay the wages that would put trained carers into the homes that needed them. I started to wonder: what exactly was it that there was no money for? The buildings were there. The people were there. The training materials existed. Even the jobs existed.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that every conversation I'd had started with the same assumption: that the government's budget worked like mine. When I say I can't afford something, it's because I don't have the pounds in my account. But the government issues the pounds. It doesn't need to find them before it spends them.

I used to accept the excuse that there was no money. I hear it differently now. The government that creates the currency told me it couldn't deploy enough of it to connect the people who needed work with the people who needed care. But 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. When HM Treasury sets the spending limits that force councils to cap care wages below the living wage, that's not an accounting problem. It's a political decision about priorities. When the Department of Health and Social Care restructures services instead of funding them properly, that's not fiscal responsibility. It's a choice about what matters.

I'm still here, still watching, still trying to get back into the work I know I'm good at. But now I understand something I didn't understand at the start. This isn't just my story, or Sandra's story, or Janet's 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 not to open it.