Celeste

I always knew I wanted to be a midwife. When I was sixteen, my mum had complications during what should have been a straightforward pregnancy with my little brother. I spent weeks with her in hospital, watching the midwives work, seeing how they held our family together during the scariest time we'd ever faced. My mum made it through fine, and so did my brother, but I never forgot how those midwives made the unbearable feel manageable. I wanted to be that person for other families.

My dad drives buses for Transport for London, and mum works as a teaching assistant in Sutton. We're not a family that takes university for granted. I knew I'd need to work my way there. After finishing college, I got a job as a healthcare assistant at Epsom Hospital, thinking it would be good experience and help me save money for university. For three years, I worked on the maternity ward, doing everything from taking blood pressure readings to helping new mothers with breastfeeding. In my spare time, I studied for my Access to Higher Education qualification, determined to get the grades I needed for a midwifery degree.

In 2019, I finally felt ready. I applied to Kingston University's midwifery programme and was over the moon when they accepted me. The course looked perfect - practical, thorough, taught by midwives who still worked on the wards. When I went to confirm my place that summer, I expected to walk away with my enrollment sorted and my student finance in place.

Instead, the admissions officer looked uncomfortable. "I'm really sorry," she said, "but Health Education England has cut our commissioned places from 40 to 25. We had to withdraw offers for 15 students, and yours was one of them. It's nothing to do with your qualifications - it's just budget constraints from Treasury spending limits."

Budget constraints. It sounded reasonable at the time. Everyone knew the NHS was under pressure. I was disappointed, but I understood. These were tough times.

I waited a year and reapplied. Same result. "There is no funding," the admissions team told me in 2020. "The Treasury has maintained the reduced allocation." Again, I accepted it. The country was dealing with a pandemic. Money was tight everywhere.

But I wasn't ready to give up. I applied to St George's University of London instead, hoping another institution might have more places. The admissions staff there were more direct about what was happening. "HM Treasury treats training places as costs to be minimised rather than investments," one of them explained. "They're not looking at how many midwives the hospitals actually need. They're looking at how much it costs to train them, and trying to spend less."

That conversation stuck with me. I started asking questions I hadn't thought to ask before. If the hospitals needed more midwives - and everyone said they did - why were we training fewer of them?

I decided to visit the Kingston campus, just to see the facilities I'd missed out on. What I found made no sense. The midwifery department had beautiful simulation suites with high-tech equipment designed to replicate real birth scenarios. But they were empty. Completely empty, in the middle of what should have been teaching time.

A lecturer I met in the corridor was willing to talk. "We've got everything we need to run a full programme," she said. "The equipment, the qualified staff, interested applicants like you. We could easily teach 40 students, maybe more. But we can only fund 25 places, so that's what we run. It's maddening."

She showed me around the unused rooms. Brand new ultrasound machines sitting under dust covers. Birthing simulators that could train students on complications they might not see for months in real placements. All of it paid for, all of it ready, none of it being used to its full capacity.

I started talking to my former colleagues from the hospital. Three of them had been made redundant during cost-cutting measures, despite the ward being desperately short-staffed. All three wanted to retrain as midwives. All three had been refused places on courses, not because they weren't qualified, but because the artificial cap on funded places meant there was no room for them.

The contradiction was right there in front of me. On one side: empty training rooms, unemployed healthcare assistants who wanted to learn, midwifery lecturers with time to teach. On the other side: maternity units across South London running dangerously understaffed, cancelling services, asking existing midwives to work impossible hours.

In the middle: someone in Westminster saying there was no money to connect these two sides.

But the government issues the pound. I started reading about how public spending actually works, and what I learned changed everything. The Treasury doesn't have to find pounds hidden somewhere in a jar before it can spend them. It creates them when it spends. The question was never whether the pounds existed. The question was whether the people, skills, and materials existed to train more midwives.

They did. All of them. I could see them with my own eyes.

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'm still here, still watching. I've found other ways to support new mothers - doula training, antenatal classes - but I haven't stopped asking questions. Every time I hear "there's no money" for training, for equipment, for staff, I think about those empty simulation suites. I think about the healthcare assistants who wanted to learn and the midwifery lecturers who wanted to teach them.

This 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. We just weren't allowed to open it.