Rochelle

I keep a photo of my mum pinned to my kitchen noticeboard. She's in her Royal London Hospital uniform, standing proud in the corridor after her shift. Healthcare assistant for twenty-three years, never missed a day unless one of us kids was sick. That photo reminds me why I wanted to become a nurse, why I saved every penny for eight years working in nursing homes around Bethnal Green and Stepney.

When the pandemic hit, I watched the news every night. Nurses working double shifts, entire wards struggling with skeleton crews, the NHS crying out for more hands. I knew I could do this work. I had been doing versions of it since I was twenty-four, helping elderly residents with medication, mobility, personal care. But I wanted the qualification, the proper training, the chance to work on the wards where my mum had spent her whole career. I applied to Queen Mary University of London in early 2022, certain this was my moment.

The acceptance letter came through in March. They wanted me. My grades were strong, my experience was exactly what they were looking for. Then came the second letter. "We regret to inform you that there are no funded training places available for the September 2022 intake. Health Education England has reduced the budget allocation for London nursing courses due to spending constraints. You may apply for a self-funded place at the full fee rate."

Forty-five thousand pounds. I read that number three times. The admissions officer, when I called, sounded genuinely sorry. "The Treasury has capped our healthcare training budgets," she explained. "We simply cannot offer the funded places we used to. It is not that you are not qualified. There is no funding."

I tried City, University of London next. Same story. King's College London after that. Each admissions office gave me the identical explanation: Health Education England's budget had been cut, Treasury spending limits meant fewer funded places, the money was not there. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening belts. Everyone was making difficult choices. I accepted it because what choice did I have?

So I took on the debt. Forty-five thousand pounds to train as a nurse in the city where the NHS was crying out for nurses. I started at Queen Mary in September 2022, part of a smaller cohort than previous years. The lecturers mentioned it constantly: fewer students, fewer resources, fewer funded placements. The government, they said, could not afford to train as many nurses as the health service needed.

I believed this for nearly two years.

Then, in July 2024, I was walking past the new Barts Health NHS Trust training centre in Whitechapel. Gleaming building, state-of-the-art facilities, opened with great fanfare in 2021. I had always wondered what it looked like inside. The security guard was having a cigarette break outside, and I asked if he knew whether they ran nursing courses there.

"They could do," he said. "Got all the kit for it. Simulation labs, clinical skills suites, lecture theatres. Whole third and fourth floors are empty, though. Built for two hundred more nursing students, but the funding got pulled. Been sitting empty since they opened. Seems a waste."

Two hundred nursing students. Empty floors. Equipment sitting unused.

I stood there on Whitechapel Road, watching buses full of healthcare workers heading to and from the Royal London Hospital, and something clicked. The people existed. I was proof of that. Fatou from my estate, Ahmed from the flat above my mum, dozens of healthcare assistants I had worked with over the years, all experienced, all motivated, all turned away from nursing courses because there was "no funding." The buildings existed. I was looking at one. The NHS needed nurses. Every ward I had ever set foot in was understaffed.

What exactly was it that there was no money for?

The UK government prints the pounds. It mints the coins. It issues the currency that everyone in this country uses for everything they buy. That same government told me it could not find enough of those pounds to train the people who were standing ready to work in the hospitals that desperately needed them. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed. They did. Whether the skills could be taught. They could be. Whether the materials and buildings were available. They were.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When your household says "we cannot afford it," you genuinely cannot afford it because you do not issue your own currency. You have to earn pounds before you can spend them. The government does not. The government spends pounds into existence every time it pays a salary, funds a service, builds a hospital. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

I finished my degree in 2024. I am working as a nurse now at the Royal London Hospital, the same hospital where my mum worked for over two decades. I love the work, but I see it differently than I used to. When I walk past those empty training floors in Whitechapel, or when I hear that another healthcare assistant could not get onto a funded course, I understand what I did not understand when I started. This is not about budgets. This is not about the government running out of money. This is about choices made by people who had alternatives.

Every colleague who took on debt to train as a nurse, every healthcare assistant turned away from courses they were qualified for, every ward running short-staffed while training centres sit empty, is evidence of the same thing. The resources existed. The people existed. The need existed. Someone in Westminster decided not to connect them, and then called that decision a financial necessity.

It is the same story in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone with the power to issue currency says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is not bare. The cupboard belongs to the people who decided not to open it.