Dylan

Dylan did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across North West as you listen. This is their story. In one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, healthcare training places sit empty while people who want to become paramedics are turned away for lack of funding. The work that keeps communities alive goes undone not because the people do not exist, but because someone in Westminster decided connecting them to that work was too expensive. My name is Dylan, I'm 24, and I live in Farnworth in Bolton North East. I've wanted to be a paramedic since I was 12, watching my granddad struggle with his diabetes. He had these episodes where his blood sugar would crash, and I'd see the paramedics arrive and just know how to calm him down, check his levels, get him stable. They never rushed, never panicked. Just did what needed doing. That's who I wanted to be. Mum works nights cleaning at Royal Bolton Hospital. She'd come home at 6am and tell me stories about the wards, how short-staffed they were, how the paramedics would sometimes have to wait hours just to hand patients over because there weren't enough nurses. She always said the NHS needed more people who actually cared, not just people who saw it as a job. I knew she meant me. I did my A-levels at Bolton College, worked part-time at a care home in the evenings to save up for university. Physics, biology, maths - I knew exactly what I needed. The elderly residents at the care home would tell me I had the right temperament for emergency medicine. Mrs Harrison, who'd been a nurse herself, said I had steady hands and a calm voice. I could picture my whole future: three years training, then out on the ambulances, making the difference my granddad's paramedics had made for our family. In 2019, I applied to study paramedicine at the University of Central Lancashire. It was the obvious choice - close to home, good reputation, and they had one of the best simulation suites in the North West. I'd visited during their open day and watched students practicing on the mannequins, learning how to intubate, how to manage cardiac arrests. The lecturers talked about the urgent need for more paramedics across the region. I left that day certain I'd get a place. The rejection letter came in August. "Unfortunately, due to the high number of applications, we are unable to offer you a place on this year's paramedicine course." Standard rejection language, nothing personal. But then I rang them directly, and the admissions officer told me something different. "To be honest, your grades are fine. The course is oversubscribed, but not because we have too many qualified applicants. We simply don't have enough funded training places." I didn't understand the distinction then. Oversubscribed sounded like success - so many people wanting to help the NHS that they couldn't fit us all in. The woman on the phone gave me the number for Health Education England North West. "They commission the training places," she said. "Maybe they can explain the funding better than I can." I called Health Education England the next morning. The person I spoke to was polite but blunt: "Funding constraints have limited the number of training places we can commission this year." When I asked what that meant, she said the budget allocation from the Treasury wasn't sufficient to cover all the places the universities could deliver. "We have to prioritise based on available resources." I accepted that explanation. It sounded reasonable. Budgets are finite, demand is high, difficult choices have to be made. I spent the next year working full-time at the care home, reapplying for 2020. Same result. Same phone call. Same explanation: "There is no funding for additional places this year." 2021 was my third attempt. By then, I was starting to feel like I was missing something obvious, like everyone else understood some basic rule of the system that I didn't. I went back to the University of Central Lancashire for their open day, thinking maybe I needed to see what I was competing against. Walking through the paramedicine department, I noticed something strange. The main lecture theatre had about 200 seats, but the current cohort looked like maybe half that. I asked one of the student ambassadors showing us around. "Oh yeah," he said, "we've got loads of empty places this year. Same as last year. They tell us they could easily take more students, but there's no budget allocation to fill the spaces." I stared at those empty seats. Actual empty seats, in the room where I wanted to be learning how to save lives. The lecturer giving the presentation mentioned how desperately the North West needed more paramedics, how they were struggling to meet call targets, how some rural areas were waiting over an hour for ambulances. Then he said, almost as an aside, "We'd love to train more of you, but our hands are tied by the commissioning process." After the open day, I walked back through Farnworth trying to make sense of what I'd seen. I stopped to talk to some of the neighbours I'd known since I was a kid. Mr Thompson from three doors down had been made redundant from his warehouse job during the pandemic. Mrs Ahmed next door had lost her retail position when the shop closed. Both of them mentioned they'd been thinking about retraining, maybe getting into healthcare where there seemed to be job security. I counted them as I walked: seven people on my street alone who'd lost work and would jump at the chance to train as paramedics, nurses, healthcare assistants. The demand from applicants wasn't the problem. The need for workers wasn't the problem. The teaching capacity wasn't the problem. So what exactly was it that "there was no funding" for? Then I walked past the old community training centre on Albert Road. I'd driven past it hundreds of times but never really looked at it properly. It had been used for NHS skills training until about 2018, when it was closed as part of some "efficiency savings." Through the dusty windows, I could see the training equipment still inside: hospital beds, monitoring devices, even what looked like an ambulance simulator. Just sitting there, unused. That's when it clicked. The government that issues the pound was telling me it couldn't find enough pounds to connect the people standing right there with the training places sitting right there, to do the work that everyone agreed needed doing. The real question wasn't about money. It was about whether the people existed - they did. Whether the skills could be taught - they could. Whether the materials were available - they were, sitting unused in a locked building. The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The same logic as a household saying "we can't afford it," except a household doesn't print 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 here, still working at the care home, still watching those ambulance delays get longer. But I understand now what I didn't understand three years ago. 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 insists the cupboard is bare. The cupboard isn't bare. Someone just decided not to open it. What Dylan experienced has a name: Fake Experts. This technique relies on citing economists or commentators who treat the household budget analogy as self-evident truth, as though repeating it makes it real. Think of how tobacco companies used to parade doctors in white coats to claim cigarettes were harmless, or how pharmaceutical companies fund studies that happen to support their products. The authority of expertise gets weaponised to defend a conclusion that serves specific interests. In Dylan's story, every time someone said "there is no funding," they were channeling fake expertise that treats government budgets like household budgets. Health Education England cited "funding constraints" as though the Treasury might run out of pounds to spend on training. University administrators explained "budget allocations" as though the government that issues the currency needed to find money before it could spend it. The specific objection here is telling: "Economists say we cannot spend more on health without causing inflation." 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. And in Dylan's constituency, those resources were sitting idle - empty training seats, unemployed neighbours, unused equipment in a locked building. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Bolton North East ranks 89 out of 543 English constituencies for deprivation and falls in decile 2, making it one of the most deprived areas in the country. The constituency has 811 registered charities and received £17.5 million in total grants from major funders. 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.