Kemal

My name is Kemal, I'm 31, and I grew up on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth. My parents came from Cyprus and ran a corner shop on the Old Kent Road. When I was eight, my grandmother had a diabetic emergency during Ramadan. The paramedics who came to help her were calm, professional, and probably saved her life. I knew from that moment what I wanted to do.

It took me years to get there. I did my A-levels at night school while working in my parents' shop during the day, studying between serving customers and restocking shelves. When I got accepted onto the paramedic science degree at London South Bank University in 2015, my father closed the shop early and we celebrated with Turkish coffee and baklava. He said I was the first in our family to go to university. I graduated in 2018 with first-class honours, ready to serve my community.

I applied immediately to London Ambulance Service for a paramedic position. They called me in for an interview, looked at my grades, and then told me what I hadn't expected to hear. "There are no funded training places available," the manager said. "Despite your qualifications, we cannot take you on." When I asked why, she said it simply: "There is no funding."

I tried St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust next. Same response. "Health Education England has cut our training budgets," they explained. "We'd love to have you, but there's nothing we can do." I went to Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Same story. King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust gave me the identical answer. Every door I knocked on, the same words: budget cuts, no funding, hands tied.

At first, this made sense to me. Budgets are tight everywhere. Money doesn't grow on trees. I accepted what I was told and took a job as a healthcare assistant at King's College Hospital, thinking I'd wait it out until the funding came back.

For two years, I watched the contradictions pile up. I'd see ambulance queues snaking around the block outside A&E, sometimes fifteen or twenty vehicles deep, crews stuck for hours because there weren't enough staff inside to take handovers. Patients lying on trolleys in corridors. Nurses running between wards because they were short-staffed. Meanwhile, I was being told repeatedly that paramedic recruitment was frozen due to Treasury spending constraints.

Then in 2020, I discovered something that didn't fit the story I'd been told. London South Bank University had 40 unfilled paramedic training places. Forty. The university was ready to teach. The students were ready to learn. But Health Education England couldn't fund the clinical placements, even though trusts across South London were crying out for qualified staff.

Every week, I'd walk past those empty simulation labs at the university. Expensive equipment sitting unused. Mannequins that could teach life-saving skills gathering dust. The lecturers were there. The curriculum was ready. The people who wanted to train were standing outside, like me, being told there was no money.

I started to wonder: what exactly was it that there was no money for? The building existed. The teachers existed. The students existed. The hospitals that needed us existed. The patients who were waiting existed. What part of this chain required something that didn't exist?

In 2021, NHS England announced additional funding for paramedic training. I applied again, hopeful. They called me in and told me the money had been redirected to cover existing staff shortages rather than training new ones. "We cannot afford to run that programme," they said.

I stood in that office, looking at the person who had just told me they couldn't afford to train the people who would solve the staff shortages they were spending money to cover. The logic ate its own tail. We can't train new staff because we're spending all the money on overtime for the existing staff who are burned out because there aren't enough of them. Round and round.

That night, I walked home through Peckham, past neighbours who'd waited hours for ambulances, past the empty training facility, past the hospital where I worked as an assistant instead of the paramedic I'd trained to be. I thought about what "there is no money" actually meant when it came from the government that issues the pound.

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'm still here. Still watching the ambulance queues. Still seeing the empty training places. I understand now that this is not 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 chose to keep it locked.