Shahid

I've wanted to be a paramedic since I was twelve, watching the crew work on Mr Ahmed after his heart attack outside our flat in Byker. They moved with this calm precision, bringing him back from the edge. I knew then that was what I wanted to do with my life. My dad worked nights at the biscuit factory, my mum cleaned offices before dawn, and they both told me I could be whatever I worked for. So I worked.

Eight years in a call centre while doing my A-levels part-time. Not glamorous, but it paid the bills and taught me how to stay calm when people are panicking on the other end of the line. By thirty, I was ready. I had the grades, the life experience, the absolute certainty that this was my calling. I applied to North East Ambulance Service for paramedic training in 2019.

The response was polite but firm. The course was oversubscribed, they said. Despite my excellent application, there simply wasn't space. They wished me luck elsewhere. Fair enough, I thought. Competition is healthy. Shows the profession attracts the right people.

So I contacted Newcastle University directly about their paramedic science degree. The admissions officer was apologetic but clear: Health Education England had reduced funded places by forty percent that year due to Treasury spending constraints. "There is no funding," she said, like she was explaining the weather. It sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight everywhere, right?

I tried South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust next. Same story, word for word. HEE funding cuts meant fewer places. The pattern was becoming clear, but I still believed the explanation. Of course there's limited money for training. Of course they have to make hard choices about where to spend it.

Northumbria University was my backup plan. Their paramedic course had been well regarded for years. But when I called, they told me it had been suspended indefinitely. "There simply isn't the budget for more training places," the administrator said. She sounded genuinely sorry, but what could she do? Money doesn't grow on trees.

I took a job as a healthcare assistant at Freeman Hospital while I waited for things to improve. Good work, important work, but every day I saw how desperately they needed more paramedics. Ambulances queuing outside A&E because there weren't enough crews to respond to calls. Patients waiting hours for emergency transport. The shortage was real, visible, urgent.

Two years later, in 2021, I was visiting my old secondary school in Walker for a reunion when I saw something that made no sense. They'd converted three unused classrooms into a state-of-the-art medical simulation suite. Full-size ambulance mock-ups, advanced life support equipment, monitors that could simulate every cardiac rhythm you'd ever encounter. It was better equipped than some actual emergency departments I'd seen.

But it was empty. Not just that day – most days, according to the caretaker. HEE couldn't fund students to use it, he said. All that equipment, all that space, designed precisely for training people like me, sitting unused because "there isn't the budget."

That evening, I was in my local pub when I got talking to three lads I'd known from school. All of them had been made redundant when their factory closed. All of them wanted to retrain as paramedics. All of them had been turned away from the same empty training centre I'd just seen. They'd been told the same thing I'd been told: no money, no places, nothing to be done.

That's when something clicked. I looked at these three men, all ready to work, all capable of learning, all desperate to serve their community. I thought about that empty training centre with its ambulance simulators gathering dust. I thought about the queues outside A&E and the calls that went unanswered because there weren't enough crews.

The people existed. The building existed. The equipment existed. The need existed. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The more I thought about it, the stranger it sounded. The same government that issues every pound note, that creates money when it spends, was telling me it couldn't find enough pounds to train people who were standing right there, ready to learn. It was like saying the Royal Mint had run out of metal to make coins.

I started to understand that "there is no funding" wasn't a fact about economics. It was a choice about priorities, dressed up in the language of impossibility. Someone in Westminster looked at that training centre, looked at those unemployed workers, looked at the ambulance queues, and decided that connecting them wasn't worth doing. Not because it couldn't be done, but because they chose not to do it.

I'm still here, still watching, still ready to train when they decide the people of Newcastle deserve proper emergency cover. But I hear those excuses differently now. When they say "we cannot afford more paramedic training," what they mean is "we choose not to fund more paramedic training." When they say "the budget won't stretch," what they mean is "we won't stretch the budget."

The government that prints the notes and mints the coins told me it couldn't find enough of them to train people who could save lives. But the real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the equipment was available. They were. All of them.

What I now understand is that this isn't just my story. It's happening in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Whitehall says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard isn't bare. They just choose to keep it locked.