11/06/26:

He who pays the piper calls the tune?!

Interesting little news story on Energy FM caught my eye today, regarding some comments made in Keys on “collective responsibility” and electronic voting.

https://www.manx.news/the-issue-with-collective-responsibility/?fsp_sid=18966

The motion called for all votes in the Keys to be recorded and published. Sounds good right?

The minister referred to in the news article was making the point that a simple electronic record of voting would not communicate the full position of all members casting those votes, because they may be bound by collective responsibility - and so their true position on any matter may not be represented by the vote.

The simple solution to that is to publish EVERYTHING, including all of the minutes from the Council of Ministers and the votes therein. Either you believe in transparency (as she claimed), or you don’t.

The more interesting amendment from that session was from Mr Ashford, who as far as I can tell basically argued that every vote should not be recorded because it would take too long… (https://www.tynwald.org.im/spfile?file=/business/hansard/20202040/k260609%20DRAFT.pdf)… which raises two questions…

1. How does an electronic vote take any longer than a traditional vote? When electronic voting was first discussed and introduced by Tynwald in the early 2000s one of the main selling points was that it would be quicker (https://tynwald.org.im/index.php/spfile?file=/business/pp/Reports/2003-NN-0014.pdf), so how have we gone backwards? How long does it take to push a button? Surely this is a solvable technical problem in 2026?

2. Even if we accept the additional time argument, the position taken - that the HOK is not willing to record every vote because it would take longer - is an insult to the public who pay handsomely for this service. We’re paying several million pounds a year to run parliament, but they’re not prepared to spend a few seconds recording what they’re actually doing? Back when I had staff I used to tell them, no timesheets, no pay.

Mr Ashford’s amendment carried unanimously, so as things stand all votes will not be automatically recorded.

10/06/26:

The right kind of rewewable...

I dug out my passport this afternoon and headed off 'down the north' to see what them crafty monkeys in Andreas are up to - with their proposals for a renewable energy development.

Long-story-short... a private land owner + technology partners + investors are about to apply for permission to develop a renewable energy production facility based on the former Andreas Airfield. The proposal is relatively small scale (30MW total - a good size for testing the concept), using a combination of solar & anaerobic digestion (AD - produces biogas to fuel electricity generation). Entirely privately funded.

The AD portion is roughly 2MW, and will generate demand for around 50,000t of agricultural feedstock (grass, maize... pretty much anything that will decompose) per year.

So here we have a local renewable energy proposal (with funding in place), which will not only generate renewable energy, but stimulate demand for the local agricultural sector (which is crying out for support), AND keep a significant portion of the money spent on energy bills in the local economy. All while being no more visually intrusive than most conventional farm infrastructure. I think they call that a 'no brainer.'

The only sad part of my visit was that I also went to the presentation of the government commissioned AEA renewable energy report back in 2010. That report clearly indicated bio-fuels were probably a good option for the IOM - for all the reasons given above. And now private enterprise is set to prove what IOMG paid to be told, and then ignored 16 years ago. Can you imagine how many hundreds of millions of pounds better off we would be now if we'd started switching to locally produced energy in 2010.

That is the cost of disjointed and unaccountable government. Anyone fancy a windmill?

09/06/26:

FOR THE TREES HAVE NO TONGUES...

Energy FM News Article:

The DEFA Minister answered some rather toothless questions in Tynwald today about the recent harvesting and export of government timber. Without further context the answers were effectively useless. So let’s try and add something… It is possible to find some more (very limited) information elsewhere, and from there we can do some (fully acknowledged) very rough back-of-a-fag-packet maths, to try and work out how bad this sequence of events has potentially been for the Manx public.

Significant recent storm damage meant that there was a lot of timber in urgent need of extraction, and on the face of it we don’t really have the demand for that much timber. So maybe sale and export makes sense?

35000t exported apparently, according to the government’s published figures.

35000t of unprocessed softwood, at approximately 2000kWh per tonne = 70,000,000kWh.

Delivered Energy Cost of DEFA’s own supplied Biomass - approximately 4p per kWh.

70,000,000kWh @ 4p per kWh = £2.8m.

Unfortunately the figures given in Tynwald do not correlate directly to the exported volume, but it doesn’t look good nonetheless.

But there’s more…

In 2003/4 the same government which owns these trees paid £44m for a solid fuel power station (also known as the Energy From Waste Plant), located at the bottom of Richmond Hill. That power station was designed to be oversized in order to insure future capacity. It still consistently runs at roughly 80% capacity - which is not good for it as they are designed to run at 100%.

Max capacity 60k tonnes, regular throughput roughly 50k tonnes.

The EFW plant apparently uses approximately 350 to 400k litres of DIESEL every year as ‘operational fuel’ - some of which is used for maintaining temperature when ordinary waste throughput is low in volume or quality.

If you look at your latest electricity bill you will see that you are being charged roughly 29p per kWh for this energy. Roughly 10% it is coming from this power station.

Can you see the problem here?

We paid £40m for an oversized solid fuel power station, and we have to (indirectly) pay for hundreds of thousands of litres of diesel to run it (some of which is used simply because it is run below capacity). Current spare capacity is roughly 10k tonnes a year. The energy that plant produces is sold back in to the local economy for 29p per kWh.
We have exported 35k tonnes, or 70,000,000kWh of our own renewable energy, and lost a significant portion of its value in the process.
All of the money and added value could have stayed here.

This is the cost of disjointed government.

How much longer do we want to accept this?

For further reading on the potential benefits of using our own energy take a quick look at the very good report IOMG also paid for in 2022.

https://www.netzero.im/media/y55bqiqa/isle-of-man-biomass-feasibility-study-report.pdf

https://www.facebook.com/100064070553650/posts/pfbid09Dq4Kin8GavNtCmEnwDFF84jSx8TWQDjMZkfyYZpEGPWpaF5dDkcUPxV9RDE4R47l/?

08/06/26 :

MANX CARE 2.0?

Manx Radio News: Health Minister says “Manx Care 2.0 is around the corner following a governance review.”

“Manx Care 2.0” is a very interesting choice of words. It indicates that Manx Care 1.0 is now an officially recognised failure, and clearly the Council of Ministers believes it can improve things - with it’s own version 2.0

But we’re missing a step aren’t we? Surely if we are again going to pretend Government can fix it, we first need to clarify why version 1.0 failed - don’t we? Any other approach (after so many failures) is insanity - isn’t it?

If you need a reminder of how tragic this pantomime is, please read the first paragraph of Sir Jonathan Michael's report...

(https://www.gov.im/media/1365879/independent-health-and-social-care-review-final-report.pdf)

He knew this was going to happen.

The most important point to re-clarify here is that more than half of the recommendations in Sir Jonathan Michael’s report have not been implemented. Specifically the most important ones, which would actually change how things are run!

The funding model has not been fully implemented. The overarching legislative reform has not been completed (or even started in some cases). There has been virtually no progress on the “Unified Clinical Strategy”, and the true separation of services to become fully ‘medically led’ has not been implemented as intended.

Who is responsibile for this failure of implementation if not IOMG / the Council of Ministers? And now the Council of Ministers is going to come up with it’s own solution - after not following through on the last set of commitments approved by Tynwald?

Why is it like this? Because the system allows it to be this way. It is this way, because it can be. Only by changing the rules of the game will anything change. How much longer are we going to accept this twaddle?

https://www.manxradio.com/news/isle-of-man-news/health-minister-manx-care-2-0-is-right-around-the-corner/

07/06/26 :

Who holds the purse strings?

In December 2024, Tynwald agreed to set up an internal committee to look at how our budget is set and agreed. In 2026, the report came back. It essentially confirmed that by the time ‘The Budget’ is debated in Tynwald the big decisions have mostly already been made. The report notes that the laws which govern this process give Treasury and CoMin significant authority, but say very little about how the process should actually be carried out (especially with regard to the will of the public), or about who is accountable.

The report clarifies that the process is mostly confidential, rushed, and exempt from amendment by the time it reaches Tynwald – it is an all-or-nothing deal - a gun to the head. Our elected representatives are basically forced into agreement, or risk being the ‘boat rockers’. Clearly, that is not a good basis for the best outcomes. The report notes that all of this effectively puts the IOM well below international standards, and that once the budget is agreed there is very little in the way of accurate reporting as to how it is implemented. The report made 25 recommendations for improvement.

In May 2026, the Council of Ministers responded. The majority of the recommendations – specifically all of those that would have addressed the valid concerns raised – were rejected. They were rejected mostly on the basis that implementation would represent too significant a change at that point in the administration, and that the proposed schedule was too optimistic. The response also suggested that the report should have recognised the ‘success’ of the current process over many years. This is a process which has been running a £100m+ budget deficit (eating into the growth of our reserves) for over 14 years, whilst prioritising numerous unpopular capital schemes. And so, the chance of any improvement or change in the way the most significant decisions are made by government was firmly kicked into the long grass. Someone else’s problem. Our problem. Only a fundamental change in the way government operates will allow this bull to be taken by the horns.

https://tynwald.org.im/spfile?file=/business/opqp/sittings/20212026/2026-PP-0060.pdf

https://tynwald.org.im/index.php/spfile?file=/business/opqp/sittings/20212026/2026-GD-0059.pdf

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