Saoirse

I grew up watching my parents come home from their NHS shifts with stories that made me want to follow them into healthcare. Mum was a ward sister at the Royal Free, Dad a porter at Great Ormond Street. Around our dinner table in Camden, they would talk about the patients they had helped that day, the colleagues who had gone above and beyond, the small victories that made twelve-hour shifts worthwhile. By the time I was sixteen, I knew I wanted to be a nurse.

After my A-levels at Camden School for Girls, I took a job as a healthcare assistant to gain experience while I saved up and applied for nursing degrees. I loved the work immediately. Being on the wards, seeing how the nursing team coordinated care, watching patients recover – it confirmed everything I had felt growing up. I spent two years as an HCA, learning the rhythms of hospital life, building my CV, preparing for the next step.

In 2019, I applied to Middlesex University's nursing programme. My grades were strong, my healthcare experience solid. I had references from ward managers who had watched me work. When the rejection letter arrived, it was brief: the cohort was full. I was disappointed but not defeated. These things happen. I would try again.

I reapplied in 2020, assuming that with another year of experience, I would be a stronger candidate. This time, the response was different. The admissions tutor called me in for a meeting. She looked uncomfortable as she explained that Health Education England had reduced funding for training places due to "budget constraints" and "efficiency targets set by HM Treasury". She said they had wanted to accept more students but simply could not afford to run additional cohorts.

I accepted this explanation. It sounded reasonable. Budgets were tight everywhere. The government had to make difficult choices. I decided to wait another year, continue working as an HCA, and reapply when the funding situation improved.

I spent that year at University College London Hospitals, working on wards that were clearly understaffed. Nurses were doing the work of two people. Agency staff filled gaps at enormous cost. Patients waited longer for basic care. But when I reapplied in 2021, I received the same response. NHS England's workforce planning had been "recalibrated", training budgets were frozen. The admissions tutor repeated the same phrase: "There is no funding."

I started to feel stuck. I was doing work I loved, but I could see the ceiling. As an HCA, there were limits to what I could do, limits to how I could help. To become the nurse I wanted to be, I needed the training that remained just out of reach.

That year, I started volunteering at a community health centre in King's Cross. The centre served people who could not get GP appointments because there simply were not enough doctors. The waiting lists were months long. People came to the centre for basic health checks, advice about managing chronic conditions, support that should have been available through their GP practice but was not.

One Saturday, I was helping the centre manager clear out storage rooms to make space for a new mental health service. We were moving boxes of materials when I found something that stopped me cold: unopened packages of nursing training textbooks, simulation equipment still in its plastic wrapping, anatomical models that had never been used. The manager saw me staring and explained that the upstairs rooms had been set up as a satellite training facility in 2018. The plan had been to run nursing courses in partnership with local universities, bringing training directly into the community where it was needed most.

"What happened?" I asked.

She shrugged. "The funding never came through. Decision came from above our pay grade, something about Treasury spending limits. We kept the equipment, thinking it might still happen, but..." She gestured at the dusty boxes.

I walked upstairs. The rooms were still set up as classrooms: desks arranged for small group learning, whiteboards mounted on the walls, spaces designed for practical training. Everything was there except the students and teachers. The centre had people desperate for healthcare. I knew dozens of healthcare assistants who wanted to become nurses. The materials existed, the space existed, the need certainly existed. But someone, somewhere, had decided that the government could not afford to connect them.

That weekend, I could not stop thinking about those empty classrooms. If the people existed, and the building existed, and the need existed, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The UK government issues the pound. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. What was the real constraint here?

I started to see the situation differently. The training places that had been cut were not cut because nurses were not needed – the wards where I worked were crying out for more staff. They were not cut because people did not want to train – I knew healthcare assistants across London who were desperate for the opportunity. They were not cut because the facilities did not exist – I was looking at a fully equipped training centre gathering dust.

They were cut because someone in HM Treasury had decided that spending money on nurse training was not a priority. That is a political decision, not an accounting problem. The government that prints the currency chose not to issue enough of it to train the people who were standing ready to work on wards that desperately needed them.

I am still working as a healthcare assistant. I am still volunteering at the community centre. I am still applying for nursing programmes, though now I understand what I am up against. It is not a shortage of money – money is what the government creates when it spends. It is a shortage of political will to spend that money where it is needed most.

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. Now I understand that my story is not unique to Islington North. 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 that creates its own contents whenever it chooses to fill them.