Douglas City Council appears to have a plan to solve housing issues in the city. The Council recently opened its flagship housing development the James Brown Apartments. The complex is made up of 48 two-bedroomed units, built to the latest environmental standards and fitted with air source heat pumps. So what is Douglas doing that allows it to deliver quality housing projects on time and on budget and are there lessons to learn for the Island’s other housing authorities? Douglas’s experience seem yet again to highlight the clunky, risk averse, delaying nature of government processes. Anyone out there up for delivering change?

Manx Care’s mission is to become the best small Island health and social care system in the world. An ambitious aspiration but few people would argue against it I imagine. That said, despite a substantial uplift in funding, Manx Care seems some distance away from its aspiration, and incapable of sticking to the budget set for it. So what’s going wrong and how do we cure Manx Care’s ailments. The Minister gives her diagnosis on Perspective. Can we really have the world’s best health service without draining precious resources from the rest of Isle of Man Government? It’s a big ask.

Quite a mix on Perspective this week with some cracking speeches from May Tynwald on a move to change the tax status for cohabiting couples, and a request to speed up changes to drugs law. We also have Christian Jones’ parting gift to Manx Radio, a revealing insight into a 1940s guide on how to sabotage government. It seems that what was viewed in the 1940s as sabotage is now deemed to be best practice by most European governments. Perhaps the most important mission of the next House of Keys will be to unpick the resplendent fabric of Government’s “emperor’s new clothes”.