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greentricky
No, the cap is driven by how many clinical placements are available. For example, with medical degrees universities would love to have more medical students and therefore make more money, but you can't just learn the theory, you need to practice on real people, and the NHS only has so much capacity for that.
That said, the cap was temporarily lifted in 2020/21 to accommodate the higher number of students meeting their university offers when the Covid changes to exams meant that more students got the grades to meet their offers.
Ultimately the cap is put in place by government and could be raised with more resources. But you'd need to deal with the cost of training, current university and clinical placement capacity, and up the number of clinically qualified academic staff who design and deliver courses.
The Medical Schools Council has estimated that the annual cost of increasing the number of medical students by 5,000 would be approximately £1 billion (laughs manically).