Devika

Devika did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across London as you listen. This is their story. In one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, nursing training places sit empty while wards run short-staffed. The training centres exist, the equipment exists, the people who want to become nurses exist. What does not exist is the willingness to connect them. This is healthcare workforce planning in Southgate and Wood Green, where Treasury spending limits override patient need. I wanted to be a nurse because I saw what happened when there weren't enough of us. During the pandemic, I volunteered at a care home in Wood Green, and the staff were running themselves into the ground. Twelve-hour shifts became fourteen-hour shifts. Agency workers came and went, but the residents needed continuity, familiar faces who knew their names and their routines. My mother had worked as a healthcare assistant at North Middlesex Hospital for fifteen years before her back gave out. She used to come home exhausted, talking about how they were always short-staffed, always struggling. I studied biomedical science at King's College London, but it was watching those care workers that made me want to train as a nurse. I wanted to be part of the solution. In 2022, I applied for a nursing degree at Middlesex University through Health Education England's funding scheme. My grades were excellent. I had relevant experience. I was exactly the kind of candidate they said they needed. But I was told the programme was oversubscribed and that Health Education England had insufficient budget allocation from HM Treasury to fund additional places. The admissions officer was apologetic but firm. "There is no funding," she said. "We would love to take you, but our hands are tied by the budget we receive from Treasury." It sounded reasonable. Budgets are budgets. I tried again in 2023, casting my net wider. I applied to three different London universities: King's College London, City University, and back to Middlesex. Each admissions office gave me the same response. The training places existed, but funding had been capped by NHS England's constrained budget from Treasury spending limits. At King's, the admissions tutor told me, "We could train twice as many nurses if the funding was there. The demand from students like you far exceeds what we're allowed to offer." I accepted it. Everyone accepted it. That is how these things work, isn't it? The money runs out, the programmes close, people wait. Frustrated but determined, I took a healthcare assistant role at North Middlesex University Hospital to gain experience while I reapplied for the next cycle. I thought at least I would be helping, learning the ropes, positioning myself for when a funded place became available. The work was hard but satisfying. I was doing something useful while I waited my turn. But during my shifts, I noticed something that did not make sense. I walked past the hospital's nursing training wing every day on my way to the main wards. Entire floors of classrooms stood empty. Simulation labs with all the equipment you could want – hospital beds, monitors, defibrillators, IV stands – sat unused behind locked doors. I could see through the windows. Everything was there, ready to go, gathering dust. When I asked my supervisor about it, she laughed, but not with humour. "Don't get me started," she said. "Middlesex University has the capacity to train 200 additional nurses annually, but they can only fill 60% of available places due to funding restrictions. We've got all this kit, all these classrooms, all these lecturers who want to teach, and they're sitting idle because someone in Westminster says there's no money." I walked past those unused ward simulators every day after that, and they looked different. Fully equipped training spaces, designed to teach people exactly the skills we desperately needed on the actual wards. The real wards where we were constantly short-staffed, where agency workers filled gaps at three times the cost of training permanent staff, where patient care suffered because there simply were not enough hands. The people existed. I existed. Hundreds of other applicants like me existed. The training facilities existed. The lecturers existed. The equipment existed. The need certainly existed – I saw it every shift. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? I started to understand that the government that issues the pound had chosen not to spend the pounds that would connect people like me to training places like those. It was not an accounting problem. It was a political decision dressed as an accounting problem. The constraint was never the money. The constraint was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. Where I am now, still working as a healthcare assistant, still reapplying each year, I hear those excuses differently. When someone tells me "there is no funding," I think about those empty classrooms. When NHS England says the budget is constrained, I think about the government that prints the notes and mints the coins saying it cannot find enough of them to train the people who are standing right there, ready to work. 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. This 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. It just has a lock on it, and someone else holds the key. What Devika experienced has a name: Fake Experts. Throughout history, industries under threat have deployed supposed authorities to legitimise harmful practices. Tobacco companies cited doctors who claimed smoking was healthy. Pharmaceutical companies funded studies that downplayed addiction risks. The technique works by lending false credibility to profitable lies. In Devika's case, every time someone said "there is no money," they were citing economists or policy experts who treat the household budget myth as self-evident truth. These voices appear in Treasury documents, NHS planning papers, and government statements as though their repetition makes the analogy valid. They never explain why a currency issuer should be constrained like a currency user. They simply assert it and move on. The objection to training more nurses was always the same: "Economists say we cannot spend more on health without causing inflation." But which economists? The profession is divided. Many macroeconomists argue the binding constraint is real capacity, not currency. 'Economists say' without naming them is an appeal to unnamed authority. The UK government issues its own currency. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The real constraint is resources: people, skills, materials, time. In Southgate and Wood Green, those resources were sitting idle. The training facilities existed. The people who wanted to become nurses existed. The lecturers existed. The equipment existed. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Southgate and Wood Green ranks 125 out of 543 English constituencies in the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, placing it in deprivation decile 3. The constituency has 1276 registered charities according to the Charity Commission Register for England and Wales. Total grants received amount to £30.7 million according to 360Giving GrantNav. All sources are published at Blocked Britain dot Co dot UK. Blocked Britain tells the stories of people whose lives are shaped by the gap between what Britain needs and what its institutions choose to provide. Every character is fictional. Every situation is drawn from official statistics. Produced by Blocked Britain.