What’s actually landing on Middle’s doorsteps.

Housing, family, the next generation, and the skills to build and staff all of it — plus how I’d actually work if you send me to Tynwald. Everything here is a commitment with evidence behind it and a link to check it yourself.

1 · Build what was promised — starting with Braddan Woods

Middle needs homes; the Island needs working families to be able to stay. A median house here now costs over 9 times median earnings — the worst officially recorded — and nearly double that for an 18–25 year-old buying alone. I support Braddan Woods — 320 homes, a quarter of them affordable, next to Braddan School. What I don’t support is promises evaporating after consent. Ballasalla shows how that goes: a bypass built in 2023 that won’t open to the public until 2027, and a school that needed a mobile classroom for the new estate’s children. And before we concrete more fields, I want answers on the roughly 5,700 properties the 2021 Census counted as vacant on census night — some of that will be second homes or gaps between tenancies, not spare capacity, but nobody has published the breakdown, and we should have it before we assume either way.

What I’d do:

• A public delivery tracker for Braddan Woods — the affordable quota and the access works — updated as built, flagged in Tynwald when it slips. On school places: I won’t promise a new building sight unseen, but I will make sure demand from the estate is planned for and met properly — not patched over with another mobile classroom, the way Ballasalla’s was.
• Commence the landlord registration law that’s sat unused since 2021, aligned with UK minimum standards so lets over 30 months can’t be handed out with damp and mould still in the walls — the same conditions that end up costing the health service — and get to the bottom of the vacant-property numbers.
• Keep homebuilding like Braddan Woods protected from being bought up wholesale by external investors and market power — new supply should go to people who’ll actually live in it.
• Back a tradesperson-led self-build scheme that trains apprentices as it builds — housing delivery and the construction skills shortage, solved with the same idea.

More on the numbers behind all of this is on the Observatory’s homes and housing work.

2 · Family, childcare and mental health

Childcare: 574 babies were born here in 2024 — the fewest since 1918. If we want young working families to stay, childcare has to work. The Childcare Credit was a good start; I’d extend it step by step towards funded childcare from nine months for working families — an investment of roughly £10–20m a year that pays back through parents staying in work and families staying on the Island — and review the under-2 premises and ratio rules that the Government’s own Childcare Strategy calls the single biggest inhibitor of nursery viability, without lowering safeguarding or staff standards. I won’t promise childcare alone raises the birth rate, but I will promise to work towards being an attractive place to raise a young family while working.

Family law: long, adversarial divorces are hardest on the people with the least say in them — the children. I want every divorce to put the child at the centre from day one, and to move as fast as possible away from an adversarial process and towards a resolved one — financial and parenting arrangements settled together, within 26 weeks. Ending years-long courtroom combat protects children, reduces the scope for post-separation abuse, and funds itself: money spent on the reactive system moves to the proactive one. Where children are involved, I’d also fund early, non-judgemental support for separating parents in the weeks it matters most — backing the third-sector groups already doing this, not duplicating them.

Mental health: do what works. Financial security and community are protective — so economic policy is mental health policy — and I’d back part-funding of community-supported spaces that are already doing the work.

Resilience and relationships: I’d push for secondary PSHE to properly cover three things — how other people think and process the world differently (neurodiversity), what a healthy relationship actually looks like and what isn’t one, not just the sexual-health content already there, and mental health resilience specifically. The RSE curriculum that resumed here in 2024 already publishes lesson materials to parents before they’re taught; I’d keep that same openness for anything added on top of it.

3 · An Island our kids can stay for

People worry about who’s arriving; I worry at least as much about who’s leaving. The census shows the pattern plainly — and it’s the same pattern behind my own research, The Island That Didn’t Grow: disproportionately younger local people out — the Island imports older, specialist workers because it fails to inspire and keep its own. Migration isn’t the enemy; an economy that gives our young people no reason to stay is.

What I’d do: support and finish the border-security work already under way — ID verification and advance passenger information on ferry routes, within Common Travel Area rules — because our police can’t intercept what they can’t see coming (this is first and foremost about drugs and organised crime); insist the coming facial-recognition legislation arrives with the strongest data-protection safeguards alongside it; build the skills-and-homes ladder above (apprenticeships, clinician routes, tech infrastructure with resilient power and connectivity); and look carefully at the rules around school-age work, so it’s simple and safe for teenagers to take part-time jobs in retail and hospitality — the first rung of working life here, not red tape.

4 · Training and skills, planned around who we’ll actually need

Apprenticeship uptake in the trades has fallen since funding changes in 2024, at exactly the moment construction, health and care all need more skilled people, not fewer. It shows up in the price: Treasury’s own commissioned report found construction costs here already 18% above the UK average, comparable to Outer London, with tender prices forecast to rise a further 7.5% in both 2026 and 2027 (source: Manx Radio). A shortage of skilled trades pushes prices up as directly as it pushes waiting lists up. This connects directly to housing (above) and to an ageing Island where the working-age population is under growing strain.

What I’d do: demographics-driven planning for clinicians, trades and STEM routes, and use publicly-supported housing delivery to require apprenticeship placements as a condition of the funding — turning every home built with public support into a training placement too.

How I’d actually work in Tynwald

There’s no point in changing the people without changing the system.

Government’s mandate shouldn’t be formed by post-election horse-trading behind closed doors. I’d push for government that builds consensus using policy science: within a month of the election, the real options set out and published — costed, tested, compared using the same kind of transparent, checkable modelling behind my Observatory’s economic work. By November, a full programme for government open for everyone’s comments — and genuinely acted on, not a rubber stamp.

And if the process works, we can wire it into our democracy — and be completely transparent about what we ask the electorate to vote on every five years.

We’re a community. We don’t need to shout across a room to get something done.

And locally? Two commitments that start on day one, whatever else happens: a constituency surgery every week, and every letter and email answered within three days — with my professional skills available, free, to our local Commissioners.