Asha

My name is Asha, I'm 32, and I live in Peckham where I grew up. My parents came here from Nigeria in the 1980s and ran a corner shop on Rye Lane for twenty-five years. I always wanted to be a nurse, ever since I was twelve and watched my grandmother receive care during her final illness at King's College Hospital. The nurses there were extraordinary. They saw her as a person, not just a patient. They made her feel dignified even when she was scared. I knew then that was the work I wanted to do.

I spent five years working as a healthcare assistant while studying part-time for my nursing prerequisites. It was hard financially, but I was determined to get the formal qualification. I'd seen how much more I could contribute with proper training, and I knew the NHS needed every qualified nurse it could get.

In 2019, I applied to the King's College London nursing programme. I had all the qualifications, good references from my workplace supervisors, and real experience on the wards. I thought it would be straightforward. I was wrong.

"There are only 180 training places available this year," the admissions coordinator told me over the phone. "We had 800 qualified applicants. The places are funded by Health Education England, and their budget is set by the Treasury. There is no funding for additional places."

It sounded reasonable. There was no money. Everyone understands that budgets have limits. I was disappointed but not angry. These things happen.

I applied again in 2020. Same story. Same explanation. "There is no funding," they said. "The Treasury has not increased Health Education England's allocation. We cannot create places we cannot fund."

So I took a job at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust as a senior healthcare assistant while I waited. At least I could keep working in healthcare, keep learning, keep contributing what I could while I hoped things would change.

That was when I started to see the contradictions.

In 2021, I was talking to Sarah, a colleague who worked in the education department at Guy's. She mentioned something that didn't make sense. "We've got 50 nursing training places sitting unfilled at our South London campus," she said. "The trust can't access additional funding to cover the placement costs, even though we're desperate for nurses. The simulation labs are sitting empty. The lecture halls are unused. It's mad."

I walked past those simulation labs every day on my way to shifts. They were state-of-the-art facilities: hospital beds with electronic monitors, medication dispensers, everything you'd need to train someone properly. Empty. The lecture halls had whiteboards and projectors and seating for fifty students each. Empty. Meanwhile, I was working double shifts because we were short-staffed on every ward.

At the healthcare workers' support group in Camberwell, I met Nkem, who was trying to get onto a nursing programme at Greenwich University. "Same story everywhere," she said. "Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has unfilled training places. South London and Maudsley has unfilled training places. King's College Hospital has unfilled training places. But Health Education England says there's no budget to fill them."

I started asking questions. If the training places existed, and the people who wanted to fill them existed, and the hospitals that needed qualified nurses existed, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The buildings were already built. The equipment was already bought. The lecturers were already employed. The NHS trusts were already paying healthcare assistants like me to do work that qualified nurses could do better.

The government that prints the pounds and issues the currency was telling me it could not find enough of those pounds to connect the empty training places with the people standing right there, ready to learn. That started to sound less like an accounting problem and more like a political choice.

In 2022, I finally got a place. The pandemic had forced the Treasury to temporarily expand Health Education England's budget, and suddenly there were places available. I started the programme in September 2022, three years after I first applied. The quality of training was excellent. The simulation labs worked perfectly. The lecturers were brilliant. None of the infrastructure had been the problem.

But even as I was studying, I watched the programme shrink again. The Treasury returned to pre-pandemic spending constraints in 2023, and the new cohort was smaller than mine. Sarah told me they were leaving training places unfilled again, even though the need for nurses had not decreased and qualified applicants were still being turned away.

I graduated in 2024 and I'm working now as a qualified nurse at King's College Hospital, the same hospital where I watched my grandmother receive such compassionate care. I love the work. I'm good at it. But I understand something now that I did not understand when I first applied in 2019.

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 facilities 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 training places and the people who needed them.

Every day, I work alongside healthcare assistants who could be excellent nurses if they had access to training. Every day, I see the difference that proper qualification makes to patient care. And every day, I know that somewhere in Westminster, someone is deciding that connecting those people to that training is somehow unaffordable for a government that creates the currency it spends.

This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone with the power to issue pounds says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. The decision to keep it locked was political, not financial.