Visualise how Government spends — and the size of the state.

This page is about the Government’s own finances, not the wider economy — what it takes in, what it owes, and how many people it employs to do it. (Growth, cost of living and energy are on the Economy page.)

1 · Visualise how Government spends

This is a key issue, and one everyone needs to be engaged with. Government is spending more than it raises, and the reserves that quietly covered the gap for the last decade are running low — this is never shown as one connected picture. The General Revenue Account’s own balance has gone from a surplus of £92.0m (2020) to a deficit of £263.9m (2024). The dedicated pension reserve ran dry in March 2023. And there’s a £3.06bn unfunded pension liability that doesn’t appear in any single headline Treasury figure — it’s disclosed, but never consolidated into one number you’d actually see. None of this is secret — it’s all in Treasury’s own accounts. It’s just never been joined up before — which is why I joined it up: ten years of accounts, one screen, at the Observatory, with the full economic story in The Island That Didn’t Grow, and projections on both the Manx State Pension and the Civil Service Pensions — which are paid out of departmental budgets.

What I’d do:

• Publish a plain-English “Where it went” report every time the numbers move, not just once a quarter — what came in, what went out, what changed, explained simply enough that you don’t need an accountant to follow it.
• Push for Government accounts to full international standards, readable by anyone, with every liability on the balance sheet — no off-balance-sheet surprises like the pension gap again.
• Make departmental Chief Executives and finance officers formally answerable for the financial viability of their own departments, so management’s incentives finally point the same way as yours — with proper project controls, and contracts that explicitly cover that viability, not just delivery.
• A central Governance function for simplified Government contracts and rules — not a new department, but sitting under the Cabinet Office or Treasury, alongside Procurement Services, much as the Office of Human Resources already works across Government — so contracting standards, project controls and enforcement are consistent, instead of scattered department by department.
• Publish what’s already been agreed between third parties and the Department of Infrastructure and Treasury Ministers, going back to 2015 — so we can actually learn from the commercial and project-governance mistakes already made, instead of repeating them quietly.
• Report the State Pension and the Civil Service Pension on the same basis, side by side. One sits in a fund that can run dry; the other is paid straight out of departmental budgets every year, which is exactly why it never gets talked about the same way — even though it’s the bigger long-run number. Same transparency, same planning, for both.

I will only accept accounts that are clear to you, the public — not another few hundred pages of PDF that waste your time, and just as much of the time of the Civil Servants and politicians who have to produce and wade through it too.

None of the commitments across this site are free, and I won’t pretend they are. Where I’ve put a cost on something — childcare, bowel screening — it’s an estimated range, not a guarantee dressed up as a promise, and it has to be weighed against the deficit and pension gap on this page, not ignored alongside them. The same discipline I’m asking Government to apply to itself — cost it, publish it, before you commit to it — is the discipline I’ll hold my own proposals to before asking you to back them at the polls.

On tax specifically: I don’t think it’s a question you can answer on its own. The real question underneath it is whether we can sustainably fund a health and care system that’s free at the point of use — which I want to keep — given the deficit and pension pressures on this page. That has to be a public conversation, grounded in what things actually cost, not a rate picked first and worked backwards from. I’m not going into this election promising a tax rise, or ruling one out; I’m promising that conversation happens in the open, tied to the real numbers, not decided quietly and announced after the fact.

2 · A public sector sized for the Island we actually are

Our population is roughly what it was fifteen years ago, and by several measures the public sector is no more efficient today than it was in 2011. At the same time, “bloated public sector” is a doorstep line that’s more complicated than either side admits: most public-sector employee cost is Health & Care and Education, not sprawling bureaucracy. I’d rather show you the breakdown than assert it.

What I’d do:

• Re-introduce the Government headcount cap — excluding frontline clinical and care staff, where the Health page sets out where more people are actually needed — managed through natural turnover, not redundancies.
• Publish the departmental staffing and cost breakdown, benchmarked against Jersey, Guernsey and comparable UK authorities, so “bloated” becomes a testable claim rather than a slogan either side can just repeat.

What actually funds the services this pays for — growing the economy, above all its export sectors — is on the Economy page.

Check my working — the Observatory

Every figure above comes from a public source and most of them from tools you can go and check yourself at observatory.coalfinch.com — ten years of Government accounts on a single screen, instead of 2,500 pages.