Ewan

I came to London in 2018 with one clear goal: to become a nurse in the hospitals I'd read about since I was a teenager. Growing up in Paisley, I watched my mum mark exercise books every evening after her teaching day ended, and I saw how she lit up when she talked about the kids who'd finally grasped long division or written their first proper story. I wanted that same connection, but with patients instead of pupils. The idea of working at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust felt like joining the premier league of healthcare.

I applied for a nursing degree apprenticeship there in 2019. The interview went well – I toured the facilities, met current apprentices, saw the simulation labs where they practiced procedures. But walking through the education wing, I noticed something odd. Empty classrooms everywhere. Chairs stacked, whiteboards clean, no signs of recent use. When I asked about it, the interviewer said they'd love to take more apprentices but couldn't. Three weeks later, the rejection letter arrived: no funded places available.

I thought it was just bad timing. Applied to Health Education England's London office the following year. This time I got further in the process, met with a recruitment officer who seemed genuinely impressed by my application. She walked me through what the apprenticeship would involve, the hospitals I'd rotate through, the university modules. Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice: "Between you and me, we've got applications from brilliant candidates like yourself, but Treasury spending limits have capped our training budget. We literally cannot afford to run the programme at the scale we need."

It sounded reasonable. Disappointing, but reasonable. Everyone knows the NHS is under pressure. I accepted it and tried again with NHS England in 2021. Same story. Different person, same phrase: "The budget has been cut." By then I was starting to wonder if I'd chosen the wrong path entirely.

I took a job as a healthcare assistant instead, figuring I'd work my way up somehow. Started at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, and within weeks I could see what everyone meant about understaffing. We were constantly running between patients, covering for absent colleagues, doing the work of people who should have been there but weren't. The ward sister kept saying she'd kill for more trained nurses. The consultants complained about it in every handover meeting.

Six months into the job, I was asked to collect some equipment from the education centre. That's when everything clicked into place. I walked through corridor after corridor of empty training rooms. Lecture theatres with rows of seats facing blank projector screens. Simulation labs with mannequins still in plastic wrapping and equipment boxes that had clearly never been opened. It was like a hospital school built for hundreds of students but somehow frozen in time.

I got talking to the facilities manager, a woman called Margaret who'd worked there for fifteen years. She showed me around with a mixture of pride and frustration. "This place could train double what we're doing now," she said, gesturing at a fully equipped intensive care simulation room gathering dust. "We've got the space, we've got the kit, we've got the lecturers on part-time contracts begging for more hours. Last year alone we had to turn away 200 qualified applicants because there was 'no money' for training places."

I stood there looking at a £50,000 patient simulator in its original packaging and tried to make sense of what she'd just told me. Two hundred people wanted to train as nurses. The hospital desperately needed nurses. The training rooms were sitting empty. The equipment was ready. The lecturers were available. But somehow there was "no money" to connect these dots.

That night I went home and couldn't stop thinking about it. I'd been accepting the "no money" excuse for three years, but what exactly was it that money was supposed to buy? The building existed. The equipment existed. The teachers existed. The students existed. The need existed. What was the magical ingredient that pounds were supposed to provide?

I started looking at it differently. When Margaret said there was no money for training places, what she really meant was that someone in Westminster had decided not to spend money on training places. Not "couldn't spend" – decided not to spend. The government that prints every pound note in my wallet had chosen not to create the number of pounds that would pay lecturers to teach the students who wanted to learn to become the nurses that wards like mine were screaming for.

The real question wasn't whether the money existed. Money is numbers on computers and notes in a printing press. The question was whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the facilities were available. I'd seen them with my own eyes. They were all there, waiting.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice dressed up as an impossibility. Like telling someone you can't afford to turn on a light switch in your own house when you control the power station. The government issues the currency. It doesn't need to find pounds before it spends them any more than a football referee needs to find points before awarding them.

I'm still working as a healthcare assistant, still seeing the consequences of that choice every shift. Patients waiting longer for care because we're short-staffed. Qualified people working in coffee shops because they can't get onto training programmes. Equipment sitting unused in education centres while politicians talk about difficult decisions and tight budgets.

But I hear those words differently now. When someone says "there is no money" for nurse training, I know they mean "we have decided not to issue the money." When they talk about fiscal responsibility, I know they mean they think a government budget works like a household budget, as though the institution that creates the currency could somehow run out of currency.

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.

This isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people who want to care for others are told they can't train to do it while wards run short-staffed and politicians claim the cupboard is bare. The cupboard belongs to the people who stock it.