On Tynwald Day earlier this year, David Buttery presented a petition of doleance regarding the island’s footpaths.

Mr Buttery suggested in his petition that one agency takes responsibility, rather than the current three.

He said at the time: ’What we need is a single agency, one body responsible if you like.

’They’ve all got different things going on, they’ve got different budgets, different agendas, so it’s very easy for them to say water or the promenade is more important, whereas if you had a single agency and that’s all it does, that could work better.’

Member of the House of Keys (MHK) for Douglas South, Sarah Maltby has now picked up his petition for the upcoming Tynwald sitting in November. It will see Mrs Maltby make her maiden speech in the chamber - a rite of passage for newly elected MHKs.

Regarding her decision to pick up the petition, she said: ’I don’t want people to think "Wow, a burning issue that Sarah Maltby had was footpaths" - that’s not my burning issue.

’My points for bringing this petition up is to show that I’m listening to what petitioners say - so please get in touch with me if that’s kind of thing that you’re into - and the second reason is it’s one of those things where if you’ve got two or three government departments, who are all responsible for cutting footpaths, is that good value for money? Is that efficient?

’Is this not proving the point that lots of people make that inter-governmental departments [are] not working, and we need to have a bit more of a slicker approach to things.’

She went on: ’I’m trying to highlight by setting up this select committee that we need to [reassess the ways government works], not just for the small things like island footpaths but for the big things.

’This is just as important and we can copy this way of working hopefully in bigger projects and that should give more confidence to people outside of the House of Keys that there are people like me who are highlighting just how inefficient some of the procedures are and [we] can do better than this.’

Mrs Maltby went on to say that the footpaths need to be better maintained with less complex oversight, not only for local residents, but also for visiting tourists.

She said: ’It’s embarrassing. Tourists come here and they can’t even get round half the paths that they should be able to get around.

’The Isle of Man boasts such fantastic walking holidays but [if] you actually can’t walk around half the paths because they’ve not been maintained, that’s embarrassing.

’As an island [we] could be losing so many potential people because [those who do visit] go back saying "Oh yeah well we did go but we couldn’t actually do that part, maybe we’ll do it next time" - that’s not good enough.’

The Department of Infrastructure has explained that footpaths are routinely inspected and maintained.