Gwen

I grew up in Prescot watching my dad come home from shifts at Aintree, still in his hospital porter uniform, exhausted but never bitter. He had retrained after the pit closed, and he was proud of his work. When my gran was dying, it was his colleagues from the hospital who looked after her with such care that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the person families trusted with the people they loved most. I studied biology A-levels at Knowsley Community College and worked weekends at a care home to understand what caring really meant. By 2019, I was ready.

Liverpool John Moores University accepted me for adult nursing. I had the grades, the experience, the passion. Then came the phone call. The admissions officer was apologetic but clear: the NHS bursary places were oversubscribed. Health Education England had told them there was "insufficient training budget allocation for this cohort." I could take an unfunded place, but that meant £27,000 in tuition fees plus living costs over three years. On care home wages, it was impossible.

I took a healthcare assistant role at Aintree instead, thinking I would reapply the next year when the budget situation improved. I watched qualified nurses rushing between patients they barely had time to assess properly. I could take observations, help with personal care, but I could not administer medications or make clinical decisions. I was there to support, not to heal. The frustration built every shift.

In 2020, I reapplied. Same outcome. The university wanted me, but Health Education England's funding had not increased. The admissions officer explained that HM Treasury had capped Health Education England's budget, treating nurse training as an expense rather than an investment. I started to see the pattern: every NHS trust was complaining about nurse shortages while people like me were being turned away from training. The irony was impossible to miss.

By 2021, I was angry. I applied again, and again received the same answer. But this time I asked more questions. I asked the admissions office how many nursing places they had available in total, and how many were funded. The numbers floored me. Liverpool John Moores had 150 nursing places that year. Only 103 were funded by Health Education England. Of those 103 funded places, all were filled. But here was the crucial detail: only 53 people had applied for the 47 unfunded places. 47 training places were sitting empty.

I stood outside the nursing building and looked up at the windows. The lecture halls were there. The simulation labs were there. The lecturers were there, employed and ready to teach. The clinical placements were available on the wards where I was working as an HCA. Everything needed to train nurses existed, except the political will to fund the places. Someone in Treasury had decided that training more nurses was an unaffordable luxury while the wards where I worked were chronically understaffed.

That evening, I called Dylan, a friend from Bolton who was hitting the same walls trying to get onto paramedic training. North West Ambulance Service was crying out for paramedics while universities were turning away qualified candidates because the training budget had been capped. We compared our rejection letters. The language was identical: "insufficient funding," "budget constraints," "limited places available." Both of us could see the training capacity sitting unused while the public services we wanted to join were failing for lack of staff.

I started asking a different question. If the UK government issues the pound, why was it telling me it could not find enough pounds to train people for jobs that desperately needed doing? I had been accepting "there is no money" as a natural fact, like gravity or weather. But money is not found in the ground or grown on trees. It is created by the government that prints it. The Treasury that told Health Education England it could not afford to train more nurses is the same Treasury that issues every pound note in circulation.

The real question was never whether the money existed. The question was whether the training places existed, whether qualified people wanted them, and whether the NHS needed more nurses. The answers were yes, yes, and obviously yes. The decision not to fund those 47 empty places was not an accounting problem. It was a political choice dressed as a budget constraint.

I kept working as an HCA while this understanding crystallized. Every shift, I saw the consequences of that choice. Nurses working doubles because there were not enough of them. Patients waiting longer for care. Mistakes happening because people were stretched too thin. The human cost was visible every day, while the training places that could have alleviated it remained empty because someone in Westminster had decided the government could not afford to spend money it creates itself into the workforce the country needed.

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.

I am still here, still watching, still asking questions. I understand now that my story is not unique to Knowsley or the North West. It is the story of every constituency where people and resources exist side by side while someone in Westminster claims the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is never bare for a government that stocks it with the currency it creates.