Kamal

My dad emigrated from Pakistan in the 1980s and opened a corner shop on Colne Road. When his diabetes got worse, getting a GP appointment became a weekly struggle. I'd sit with him in those cramped waiting rooms, watching him check his blood sugar while we waited two hours past the scheduled time. That's when I decided I wanted to become a nurse. Someone had to care for people like my father properly.

I finished my A-levels at Burnley College in 2018 and worked nights stacking shelves at ASDA to save money for university applications. The work was mind-numbing, but every shift brought me closer to my goal. I applied for adult nursing at the University of Central Lancashire through UCAS and was accepted for September 2019. That's when I hit the first wall.

Student Finance England told me that NHS bursaries had been scrapped the previous year. "There is no funding," the advisor explained over the phone. "You'll need to take out a student loan like any other degree." The debt would be £27,000 over three years. I took it because I had no choice, but it felt wrong. The NHS was crying out for nurses, yet they'd removed the financial support that helped people like me train to become one.

University was everything I'd hoped for. The clinical placements at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust showed me exactly why I'd made the right choice. I watched experienced nurses save lives daily with a combination of technical skill and genuine compassion. In my final year, I started applying for newly qualified nurse positions at the same trust. The recruitment team was enthusiastic about my application. "We have 47 nursing vacancies," the manager told me during my interview. "Your grades are excellent and your placement supervisors speak very highly of you."

Then came the second wall. "However," she continued, "we can only offer you bank work. The Treasury has capped our establishment posts and we cannot afford permanent contracts." Bank work meant no guaranteed hours, no pension contributions, no sick pay. After three years of training and £27,000 of debt, I was being offered the employment equivalent of a zero-hours contract in one of the most vital professions in the country.

I asked how this made sense when they had 47 permanent vacancies to fill. "We know it's frustrating," she said. "But those posts exist on paper. We don't have the budget allocation to actually employ people in them." I accepted the bank work because I needed some income, but I kept searching for a permanent position.

That's when I contacted Health Education England North West about their NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme. I thought it might be a pathway to permanent employment and career progression. The response was familiar. "Funding constraints mean we can only support 12 training places this year, down from 35 last year," the programme coordinator explained. "We had to cut the programme because the budget has been reduced."

Again, that phrase: there is no money. Everyone accepted it as though it was a law of physics rather than a political choice. I accepted it too, at first. It sounded reasonable. Budgets are finite, resources are limited, difficult decisions have to be made.

Then I walked past the University of Central Lancashire's nursing building one evening after a bank shift. The lights were off in the simulation labs, but I could see through the windows. I counted 24 empty workstations with high-tech patient simulators, some still in their packaging. Equipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, sitting unused. The building that had trained me and hundreds of other nurses was operating at a fraction of its capacity.

That's when the contradiction hit me. If there was no money for training places, why was the training infrastructure sitting idle? The university had the space, the equipment, the academic staff. Students were queuing up for nursing courses. The NHS had documented shortages. Yet somehow, connecting these dots required money that apparently didn't exist.

I started paying more attention to the gaps between what I was told and what I could see. At Burnley General Hospital, where I'd done my medical placement, 40 healthcare assistants had been made redundant the previous month. "Budget pressures," the ward manager had explained. Yet the same wards were paying agency staff £45 per hour to fill the shifts that the redundant assistants used to cover for £12 per hour.

The more I looked, the more obvious it became. The people existed. The training facilities existed. The need certainly existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that prints every pound note and mints every coin was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to train the nurses that its own health service was crying out for.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The UK government issues its own currency. When HM Treasury says it cannot afford to fund nursing training, it means they choose not to spend pounds into existence for that purpose. When NHS England says it cannot afford permanent contracts, it means they prioritise something else over having a stable workforce. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the facilities were available. They were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The government that issues the currency chose to cap the training places, chose to limit the permanent posts, chose to leave the simulation labs empty while wards were understaffed. They had alternatives. They chose not to take them.

Now I work bank shifts across three different hospitals, never knowing from week to week what my income will be. But I also understand something I didn't understand when I started this journey. What happened to me is not my story alone. It's the story of every constituency where the government that prints the money claims it cannot find enough of it to train the workers its own services desperately need. The resources were there all along. The choice was made in Westminster, not by the market or by mathematics, but by people who decided that controlling spending was more important than controlling the suffering that follows when you refuse to deploy the currency you issue.