Eight people handed in petitions for redress to the government in the traditional political practice of Tynwald Day.

Alison Ritchie is calling for a reform of the health complaints system, after her experience of ‘perpetual failings’ in the cancer care her late mother received.

She initially submitted her complaint to ‘ensure that no other cancer patient or their family went through similar’.

Ms Ritchie said that her experience of the complaints process was ‘fairly horrific’, with her needing to enlist an advocate, and then go to the Information Commissioner, to get access to certain records.

She explained that though new complaint regulations are being brought before Tynwald in July, ‘unfortunately what they seem to be doing is replacing like with like’.

‘There’s no independence of the Independent Review Body, they’re still controlled by the Department for Health and Social Care so the DHSC continue to effectively mark their own homework,’ Ms Ritchie added.

In her petition, she states that ‘the new processes adopted internally by the new Health and Social Care Ombudsman Body can remain unchallenged even if they are blatantly unfair or simply wrong unless a complainant is willing to seek expensive legal redress’.

To highlight the issue, Ms Ritchie pointed out that since April 2021 there were 20 duty of candour (medical professional responsibility to be honest with patients when things go wrong) incidents, six of which related to patient deaths.

Health Minister Lawrie Hooper tweeted in response to her petition: ‘Health and Social Care Complaints Ombudsman Body (HSCOB) Regs are coming to July Tynwald to establish an independent health and care complaints ombudsman’.

Helen Walmsley wants to see a change in the system which determines how many escorts are allowed to accompany patients who are being transferred to the UK for medical care.

‘Basically people [currently] have to go through an assessor who will assess whether a child can have two carers go over, or just one, Ms Walmsley, who founded children’s charity A Little Piece of Hope, explained.

She continued: ‘So we’ve seen an issue where a child needed two parents to go over with them, and the parents had to fight for weeks to actually be able to have that.

‘They were told that first they would have to appeal, and the whole process was absolutely awful,’ she added.

The petition is targeted at the Department of Health and Social Care.

Simon Mann has submitted four petitions.

The first is calling for a reform of the structure of Manx Care.

He said that after attending all of the health care body’s public meetings ‘they’ve basically admitted themselves that the structure should really be like a primary healthcare trust in the UK’.

‘They don’t hold any of the properties, they don’t have sufficient powers to do very much at all beyond the mandate that Tynwald gives them,’ Mr Mann said.

He would like to see a ‘replacement constitution’, stating in his petition that Manx Care would be better ‘as a Primary Healthcare Trust with borrowing powers and the ability to take wider public and private donations’.

‘It could and should be the holding entity for all DHSC health related properties against which it should also be permitted to secure funding subject to approval of Tynwald,’ it adds.

The second calls for a review into the role of the Tynwald Commissioner for Administration (ombudsman), a job which Mr Mann says ‘has been set up to fail’, with ‘the majority of complaints taking about two years to process’.

He would rather the job be replaced by something more like an ‘investigative tribunal’ consisting of several people’.

Mr Mann’s third petition is about the process of how petitions themselves are dealt with, with him arguing that as it stands petitions are ‘being left to sit on the table for up to five years’.

The final petition calls for a change in the way members of the Legislative Council are elected, with Mr Mann wanting to see them directly elected by the public via a popular vote, rather than the current system where MLCs are elected by MHKs.

Graeme Jones, a former employee of the Office of the Clerk of Tynwald, has a petition which relates to his own employment tribunal.

Describing himself as a whistleblower, Mr Jones says that he is ‘aggrieved’ by ‘the nature and scale of weaknesses and systemic failures in the digital strategy identified by my employment with Tynwald’, and how the government’s digital strategy ignores the potential benefits of cryptocurrencies.

He wants to see a committee of three members ‘to consider and report back to Tynwald on the benefits of a better digital strategy and specific digital evidence rules to rebuild trust and confidence in the Isle of Man public sector’.

In Ray Lakeman’s petition, he calls for a reform of the misuse of drugs act. His two sons died of ecstasy overdoses in 2014.

He says that considering ‘a rising number of prosecutions for a variety of drugs, it’s pretty obvious that the prohibitive legislation isn’t working and we need to seriously look at alternatives’.

Mr Lakeman told us: ‘The situation isn’t sustainable. We’re having warnings from the [island’s] Chief Constable and other people who are aware of the problems that the legislation is creating rather than preventing.’

He said that he is ‘not particularly pro-drugs’, but ‘opposed to legislation that isn’t fit for purpose and isn’t achieving what it’s set out to do’.

The Reverend Canon Margaret Barrow presented a petition regarding church access.

She requested that Tynwald should work with the church authorities to ‘install a permanent access which caters for all abilities’ at the Church of St John the Baptist, in the village of St John’s.

The Church of St John the Baptist is more colloquially known as the Royal Chapel and it hosts the Tynwald Day service of worship that takes place before participants move on to Tynwald Hill.

But it is in regular use, with a service every Sunday, funerals, weddings and baptisms held in the building.

The petition has come after years of attempts to get a permanent access ramp installed, and several incidents in which people have had to be physically lifted into the church, something she described as ‘degrading and discriminatory’.

She said: ‘It’s a long term thing, it’s something I’ve known about for a long time and have been talking to the government about it in the past, and not getting anywhere.

‘It’s always “oh, well we’ll put it off”, “it doesn’t matter now, it’s only Tynwald Day it’s important”. But I have people coming for weddings, baptisms and so on.

‘And when a quadriplegic has got to be lifted into the church because there’s not access for them - they shouldn’t have to, they should be able to be pushed in normally.’

David Watts has submitted a petition regarding access to university places for Isle of Man students.

He wants contextual offers for Isle of Man students going to university.

He said: ‘A lot of them don’t get it, because we don’t have the socio-economic data here that corresponding students in the UK will have based on their postcode, which may allow them to get a contextual offer, which in effect means a lower entry requirement because they have faced extenuating circumstances.

‘So that might be low income family, a school with poor academic results - so a child might get three B’s at A-Level, which is brilliant for that school, but may not quite be the same elsewhere.

‘So it’s looking at individual circumstances.

‘A student may have been a carer, that sort of thing. All of those things impact on their potential grades.

‘In the UK, you just type in your postcode and see if you’d be eligible for it, you put in the Isle of Man’s postcode, and you just get rejected. We don’t have that data.’

Tynwald Day regular Trevor Cowin submitted five Petitions for Redress this year.

His first addresses the Tynwald Commissioner for Administration; the second concerns a petition he submitted at last year’s Tynwald Day, which was struck down.

The third is against the members of the Standing Orders Committee of Tynwald for ‘failing to include in its report to Tynwald on Petitions for Redress’ two of his petitions from 2020.

His fourth petition is against the Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture (DEFA) for ‘sanctioning the demolition of Glenfaba House without planning approval for such demolition’.

He argues that DEFA ‘blatantly disregarded the purpose of the Town & Country Planning Act 1999’.

The fifth petition concerns the right to speak at a planning committee meeting.

Currently, ‘only the first person to phone the planning department... has the right to speak at such meetings, and then only for three minutes.’