Economy and Business

National Income Report data shows our economy contracted by 7.4% in the two years to March 2024, and more up-to-date data is not expected until late 2026. The Chamber of Commerce have described this as among the most severe contractions in living memory, worse than the UK's peak-totrough decline in the 2008 financial crisis.

Private sector businesses are the foundation of our economy and their employees' NI and tax revenues fund our Government services.

The next administration will have to deal with the consequences of business decisions taken by companies based upon the environment we have been providing them in recent years. My position is that we should be removing the frictions that stop businesses locating and growing here, and regain the Government agility to move quickly when the private sector needs us to. There are significant opportunities in non-traditional sectors like AI, biotech, and data, and we need to be able to enable these industries to move here and thrive here.

Fix the payments infrastructure gap

Manx e-commerce businesses cannot easily access Stripe in the same way that businesses in the rest of the world can. Stripe is the world's leading payments processor and provides businesses with the APIs and infrastructure to launch and scale rapidly. I will push the Government to engage directly with mrjor providers about the regulatory and banking conditions that they need to enable our Island businesses to export and operate in a global market. If we want a digital economy which encourages entrepreneurship this kind of basic access to global services needs to be resolved.

Find out why businesses are leaving

Around 1,000 jobs have gone from financial services, eGaming, manufacturing and tourism. Those are the sectors that have funded our public services for decades. As far as I can establish, nobody in Government has systematically asked those companies why they went. I believe the Department of Enterprise should hold "exit interviews" with businesses that have decided the Isle of Man is no longer viable for them, and report what they find to Tynwald each year. If we do not know why people are leaving, everything else we do about the economy is guesswork.