Neeraj

I've wanted to be a paramedic since I was twelve years old. My grandfather collapsed in our family's corner shop in Slough, clutching his chest, his face grey as concrete. I watched the ambulance crew work on him, calm and methodical, their hands steady while mine shook. They saved his life that day. I knew then what I wanted to do with mine.

I studied sports science at Reading University, thinking it would give me a good foundation for emergency care. After graduating, I worked as a gym instructor to pay the bills while I applied for paramedic training. I cycled to work every morning, rain or shine, past the hospital, past the ambulance station, imagining the day I'd finally wear that uniform.

In 2019, I applied to the Thames Valley Paramedic Training Programme. The response was brief: all places were filled. Fair enough, I thought. Popular course, lots of competition. I'd try again next year.

2020 came, and I applied again. This time the letter was different. Funding had been cut, they said, due to "unprecedented pressures on Health Education England budgets." The programme was running fewer places than the previous year. I was disappointed but not surprised. Everyone knew the NHS was under pressure.

By 2021, I was getting desperate. I'd been working as a gym instructor for three years, watching friends move on with their careers while I treaded water. I applied directly to South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, hoping they might have their own training pathway. The response came back quickly: they couldn't fund additional training places because Treasury spending limits meant "we simply don't have the budget for new intakes."

There was that phrase again: no budget. No money. It was starting to sound like a broken record.

I contacted Reading College about their emergency care course, thinking maybe I could start with something smaller and work my way up. The programme was suspended, they told me, pending a funding review. When would it resume? They couldn't say.

That's when something shifted in my thinking. I was cycling to work one morning, taking my usual route past the college's Crescent Road campus, when I noticed something that stopped me in my tracks. The ambulance training bay was sitting there, fully equipped, with brand new training ambulances parked behind locked gates. The vehicles looked pristine, like they'd never been used. Equipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, gathering dust.

I started asking questions. If there was no money for training, why was all this expensive equipment sitting idle? I began talking to other people in similar situations. It didn't take long to find them. Twelve people from Reading alone had been turned away from paramedic training in the past two years. All given the same reason: no funding available.

I met Carla at a first aid course in Oxford. She'd faced similar barriers trying to get into nurse training. Same story: places existed, people wanted them, but the money apparently didn't. We compared notes and realised we were seeing a pattern. The training centres were there. The equipment was there. The instructors were there. What wasn't there was permission to spend the money to bring it all together.

That's when I started to understand what "there is no funding" actually meant. It wasn't that the resources didn't exist. It wasn't that the government had run out of pounds. The Treasury issues those pounds. They create them when they spend. The decision not to fund our training wasn't an accounting problem – it was a political choice.

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. But 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.

I'm still cycling past that training centre every morning. The ambulances are still there, still unused. I'm still working at the gym, still applying for courses when they occasionally open. But I see it clearly now: this isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. Someone just decided to keep it locked.