The president of the island’s Chamber of Commerce believes the government should ‘stop trying to fight reality’ over ambitions to grow the population to 100,000.

Kristan McDonald told a Tynwald scrutiny committee that the Alfred Cannan administration may need to change its economic strategy and move away from its focus on hard job and population numbers.

Giving evidence to the economic policy review committee, he said: ‘The population piece is so critical to success of the other parts of the economic strategy.

‘I think we need to stop trying to fight reality in terms of the challenge that represents for us.

‘It doesn’t feel like we’ve made massively positive inroads to some of that. There are headwinds to hitting that target as it is, and it was ambitious even assuming everything was going to go our way and it’s definitely not going our way.

‘So at the very least it needs a good hard look to understand a) was it the right target and b) were we looking at the right things in the first place, with the right measurements. Then as a result of that do we adapt our strategy?’

Mr McDonald said the challenge broadly the island is facing is that it is competing with the ‘whole of western civilisation’ on jobs at the moment.

He told the committee: ‘We have this goal of creating 5,000 jobs and getting to 100,000 population. That’s probably a similar goal of most towns in the UK and across Europe. We need to try to think a little bit differently about what our approach there should be.

‘Our general opinion is that we should be focusing more on how we can improve the productivity of our existing people and improving infrastructure and services and being less concerned about hard job numbers or population numbers.

‘We feel the actual metrics bring used for the measurements are not necessarily the right ones. I don’t really feel that target is one that’s necessarily set correctly. I think it’s a bit of a misnomer to be trying to aim for a full 5,000 jobs when actually what will those jobs look like?

‘We don’t have a good view of what the future of work will be. We are seeing significant disruption in the economy at the moment as a result of forces like AI.’

He said the Chamber had spoken to nine other organisations in the island and their views were ‘pretty unanimous’ on the focus on jobs and population targets.

‘The view is very much that there are other factors we should be focusing on and just focusing on pure job creation does not necessarily get us a stable and resilient economy which is what we are all after,’ he added.