Jake
18→25, Middlesbrough
I’m Jake. I’m 25. I live in Middlesbrough. And seven years ago I was going to be dead by now.
Not dramatically. Not in a headline way. Just… gone. The slow kind. The kind where you stop leaving the house, then you stop eating properly, then you stop caring, then one day you’re a statistic in a report nobody reads. I know that trajectory because I was on it. And I know exactly when it changed.
Where I was at 18
I left school with nothing. Literally nothing. No GCSEs worth mentioning. I’d been in and out of trouble since Year 9 — not serious trouble, just the kind that accumulates when nobody’s paying attention and you’ve got no reason to behave. Mum was on her own, working two cleaning jobs, never home. Dad left when I was 6. I had a diagnosis — ADHD — that I got at 14, three years after the school should have flagged it. By the time the diagnosis came through, the damage was done. I was “the difficult one.” The one teachers warned each other about in the staff room.
No qualifications. No skills. No prospects. Signing on at the jobcentre, getting sanctioned for missing an appointment because the bus didn’t come (there was one bus an hour to the jobcentre and if you missed it, you missed it — they didn’t care why), getting sanctioned again for not applying for a warehouse job sixty miles away that I had no way of getting to. Living in Mum’s box room. Playing Xbox until 4am because what else was there. Drinking too much. Starting to mess around with stuff I shouldn’t have been messing with.
That was me at 18. That was me when the first PM Anderson address aired and Mum said “another politician talking rubbish” and changed the channel. She wasn’t wrong, based on everything we’d ever seen. They were always talking rubbish. Why would this one be different?
Year One — the bus changed first
Middlesbrough wasn’t in the first Transitco wave but the Tees Valley was in the second. And the bus was the first thing I noticed. Not because I cared about transport policy — I didn’t even know what Transitco was. I just noticed that the 63 to the jobcentre started showing up when it said it would. And then it started running in the evening. And then the card thing happened and it was £3 instead of £5.40 each way.
I know that sounds small. It isn’t small when you’ve got £12 in your account and the bus fare decides whether you eat tonight or make it to the appointment that stops your money being sanctioned. The bus literally kept me in the system. Before Transitco, I’d missed three appointments in six months because of the bus. After Transitco, I didn’t miss one.
The carer money didn’t affect me directly but it affected Mum. She was helping look after Nan three days a week — nobody called it caring, she just did it because who else would? When the Carer’s Allowance went up and the cliff-edge went, Mum applied. She went from two cleaning jobs and exhaustion to one cleaning job, the carer money, and actually being home sometimes. First time I’d had a proper dinner cooked at home in years, she made a shepherd’s pie and I sat there thinking “this is what normal people’s lives are like.”
Year Two — the dentist and the field hospital
I hadn’t seen a dentist since I was 11. Genuinely. Seven years without a dental checkup because there was no NHS dentist taking patients. I had a tooth that hurt for about a year and I just… dealt with it. Ibuprofen and ignore it. When the dental visa dentists arrived, Mum made me go. I needed two fillings and an extraction. Dr. Okafor — Nigerian bloke, absolute legend — did it all in one session and told me off for leaving it so long. Fair enough.
The field hospital came to Teesside and Nan got her knee done. She’d been limping for two years, couldn’t do the stairs, was basically living in her front room. Eleven-minute procedure. Eleven minutes. She was walking properly within a month. The look on Mum’s face when Nan came upstairs for the first time in eighteen months… I mean. Yeah.
Year Three — the year that saved my life
I was 20 and I was in trouble. Not with the law — with myself. The stuff I’d been messing with had gone from occasional to regular to daily. I wasn’t injecting but I was spending money I didn’t have on gear that could have been anything. My mate Connor had overdosed in his flat — survived, but only because his neighbour heard the thump and called 999. That was the week the CHRC opened on Linthorpe Road.
I didn’t go straight away. I walked past it about fifteen times first. The door was just a door. No neon sign, no judgment. I went in on a Tuesday afternoon when I couldn’t score anywhere else and I was starting to feel rough. The nurse — Bev — didn’t ask me for my name. Didn’t ask me why. Just said “what do you need, love?” and took me through to a room.
Clean stuff. Known dose. Medical grade. I used in a clean room with a call button and Bev checked on me every few minutes through a window. When I came out she said “same time tomorrow if you need it, or we can talk about other options whenever you’re ready.”
I went back the next day. And the next. And for about three months. And then one day Bev said “you’ve been coming in less frequently, have you noticed?” and I hadn’t noticed, but she was right. The desperation was gone because I knew it was there if I needed it. I wasn’t chasing. I wasn’t spending. I wasn’t panicking about where the next one was coming from. And without the panic, the need got smaller.
Bev connected me with a counsellor. I did six months of sessions. I stopped going to the clinic in month four. I haven’t used since. I’m not going to pretend it was easy or that it works like that for everyone. But the clinic took me from “using contaminated street drugs alone in a bedroom heading for an overdose” to “using pharmaceutical-grade medication in a supervised room with a nurse who knew my name,” and the distance between those two things is the distance between dead and alive.
Year Three, part two — the Army Youth Programme
This is the bit that actually built me. Mum saw the advert — the Army Youth Infrastructure Programme, no qualifications needed, earn while you learn, six months of training. She basically threw the leaflet at me and said “you’re doing this.”
I turned up terrified. Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t do maths. Couldn’t name a tool beyond a hammer. The sergeant — Sergeant Williams, built like a shipping container, voice like a foghorn — looked at the twelve of us on day one and said “I don’t care where you’ve been. I care where you’re going. By the end of this you’ll be able to build a road. Let’s start.”
Six months. Every day. Drainage engineering, road construction, surveying, plant operation. I learned to drive a digger before I learned to drive a car. I got my maths up because you can’t calculate a drainage gradient without it — funny how maths makes sense when you need it for something real instead of a worksheet. I got strong. I got up at 6am. I stopped drinking. I had a purpose.
Graduation day I stood on a road I’d helped resurface in Acklam and Mum was there and she was crying and I was crying and Sergeant Williams was pretending he wasn’t crying. I got offered a job with Utilico’s maintenance division the same day. I’ve been there three years.
Year Four to Seven — becoming a person
I’m a drainage engineer for Utilico. I earn £31,000 a year. Three years ago that number would have seemed like science fiction. I’ve got a Homes for Life tenancy on a flat in central Boro — five-year minimum, rent capped, repairs done within hours when I reported a leaking pipe (four hours, plumber arrived, fixed, done — I almost didn’t believe it). I furnish it slowly because I’ve never had my own place and I want to do it right.
I did a welding course at the free college last year, evenings. Free. Just because I wanted to learn. There were people in that class in their 50s doing it for the same reason — because they wanted to and it cost nothing and nobody asked them to justify it. The bloke next to me, Phil, was 58 and had always wanted to weld. We built a metal sculpture together for the final project. It’s terrible. I love it.
I vote in every confidence vote. I’ve voted six times now — first time at 19 in Year One. I vote yes not because I love politicians but because I can see the data. The dashboard is right there. I check it like I check the football scores. I know what the government spent on Utilico this month. I know what the nuclear fleet cost per GW. I know what the CHRC programme returns per pound. I know because it’s all there, and nobody has to explain it to me because the numbers are plain.
The heritage day thing — I’m English, born here, so it’s not directly for me. But my colleague Adeel gets Eid al-Fitr off as his heritage day and the first year it happened he brought in food for the whole team the day after and said “this is what it felt like to be respected.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I just ate the biryani and thought about what respect actually means when you’ve spent most of your life not receiving any.
People’s Day we had a street barbecue. I did the cooking because the Army programme taught me to feed thirty people from a field kitchen so feeding a street is nothing. Mrs. Henderson from next door told me she remembered when Middlesbrough had a steelworks and everyone had a job and you could leave your door open. She said it felt a bit like that again. Not the steelworks part. The part where people knew each other and looked out for each other and had something to do.
I’m 25. I have a job, a home, a skill, a qualification, and a welding sculpture that looks like a drunk giraffe. Seven years ago I had a PlayStation and a drug problem and an Xbox controller with a cracked thumbstick. The system didn’t save me because it felt sorry for me. It saved me because it put things in front of me — a bus that showed up, a clinic that didn’t judge, a sergeant who didn’t care about my past, a college that didn’t charge me — and let me walk through the doors myself.
My Dashboard Direct question
I submitted it last month. It took me three days to write because you only get one a month and I wanted it to be right.
Prime Minister — I went through the Army Youth Programme in Year Three. It gave me a career, a purpose, and honestly it saved my life. I’m now a drainage engineer for Utilico and I love my job. My question is: what happens to the programme when you leave? I’m asking because I know five lads right now in Middlesbrough who are where I was at 18 and they need what I got. How do I know the next PM keeps it running?
The answer came back the same day:
Jake — thank you for this. It’s one of the best questions I’ve had. The honest answer: I can’t guarantee what a future PM will do. Nobody can. What I can guarantee is the architecture. The Army Youth Programme is established in statute under the NRSA Act. Abolishing it requires a Parliamentary vote AND a public referendum under the Referendum Requirement Act. The funding is ring-fenced in the National Infrastructure Fund. The dashboard tracks every graduate, every job placement, every outcome. A future PM who wanted to cut it would have to explain to the public — on a dashboard that shows the programme returns £3.10 for every £1 spent — why they’re choosing to waste money and abandon the next generation of Jakes. They could try. But you’d get to vote on it. And I think you’d win. As for those five lads — send them to the Middlesbrough intake centre. The next cohort starts in March. Tell them a drainage engineer sent them. That’ll mean more than anything I could say.
I sent it to the five lads. Three of them signed up. One of them started last month. His name’s Kieran. He’s terrified. He’s going to be fine.
That’s Jake. One kid. One town. Seven years. From a cracked Xbox controller to a drainage gradient and a welding sculpture that looks like a drunk giraffe.
The dashboard doesn’t just track pennies. It tracks lives.