Idris

I grew up on the Broadwater Farm Estate, raised by my grandmother after my mum died when I was twelve. The estate gets a reputation, but what I remember most is how people looked after each other when things went wrong. During the 2011 riots, I watched the ambulance crews responding to calls, working through the chaos to get people the help they needed. That was when I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

It took me longer than most to get there. I worked night shifts at Tesco while studying for my A-levels as an adult learner, catching sleep between college and work, living off energy drinks and my grandmother's cooking. By the time I got the grades I needed, I was 26. Most people would have given up, but I had seen what paramedics could do in my community. I wanted to be part of that.

In 2019, I applied to the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust for their paramedic training programme. They offered degree apprenticeships where you could train while earning, which was perfect for someone like me who could not afford to stop working. I was accepted. For the first time in years, everything felt like it was falling into place.

The first year went well. The training was intense but I loved every part of it: learning anatomy, practicing emergency procedures, understanding how to keep calm when someone else's worst day was happening in front of you. The instructors said I had a natural aptitude for the work. I was already planning my career, thinking about specializing in trauma response.

Then in March 2020, everything stopped. Not because of the pandemic, though that was starting to dominate the news. We were called into a meeting and told the programme was being suspended due to "budget constraints from Health Education England." The phrase sounded official, reasonable even. These were serious people in a serious building telling us that the money had run out. Who were we to question that?

I was not ready to give up. I contacted Health Education England directly to ask about paramedic science funding. The response was polite but firm: their training commissioning had been capped by Treasury spending limits. There were no more places available. The woman I spoke to sounded genuinely apologetic when she said, "There is no funding."

I tried Middlesex University next, thinking I could fund the degree myself. The fees were £9,000 a year. On my Tesco wages, that was impossible. I would have needed to work even more hours to afford it, which would have made it impossible to study. It was a perfect trap.

Desperate, I went to North Middlesex University Hospital to ask about alternative routes into the service. The HR manager was brutally honest with me. "We desperately need paramedics," she said. "We have unfilled positions across the trust. But we have no training budget. The positions exist, the need exists, but the money to connect trained people to those positions does not exist."

For months, I accepted this explanation. It sounded reasonable. Budgets are finite. Money runs out. Institutions have to make hard choices about what they can afford. I went back to my night shifts at Tesco, telling myself I would find another way in eventually.

Then six months later, I was walking past the London Ambulance Service training centre in Waterloo. Something made me stop and look through the windows. I could see dozens of empty classrooms, chairs stacked on desks, training equipment sitting unused. In the car park, there were ambulance training vehicles with dust on their windscreens. The building was clearly operational, but it felt deserted.

A security guard noticed me looking and came over. I asked him what was going on. He shrugged and said they were only running the centre at 40% capacity because they could not get funding approval for more training cohorts. "The building's here, the equipment's here, the instructors are here part-time," he said. "But apparently there's no money to fill the empty classrooms."

That was when I started to question what I had been told. The people existed: me and hundreds of others who wanted to train as paramedics. The facilities existed: I was looking at them. The need existed: every NHS trust I had spoken to was desperate for qualified paramedics. The instructors existed: they were working part-time because their classrooms were empty.

So what exactly was it that there was "no money" for? The government that issues the pound had chosen not to spend the pounds that would connect all these existing elements together. That was not an accounting problem. That was a political decision dressed up as an accounting problem.

I started to understand that every time someone had said "there is no funding," they were not describing a natural law like gravity. They were describing a choice that had been made by people who could have chosen differently. The Treasury that had capped Health Education England's budget was the same Treasury that issues currency. The pounds existed. The decision not to spend them into paramedic training existed alongside them.

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. I had seen them with my own eyes: the empty training centre, the unused equipment, the hospital managers who needed staff. Everything was there except the political will to connect them.

I am still here, still working nights at Tesco, still watching. But I understand something now that I did not understand when this started. When the government says it cannot afford to train the paramedics that London needs, it is not describing a financial constraint. It is describing a choice. The same government that found billions for bank bailouts and tax cuts told me it could not find the thousands needed to fill a classroom.

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.

This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is never bare. The decision not to open it is political, not financial.