The government has paid out golden goodbyes of £100,000-plus 20 times in the past five years.

Policy and Reform Minister Chris Thomas revealed the figure. A total of 329 exit payments of any sum have been made over the past five years.

Responding to a question from Jason Moorhouse (Arbory, Castletown and Malew), the Minister said a ’golden goodbye, or exit payment, was made normally when someone was made redundant, left through the mutually agreed resignation scheme (MARS) or as part of the resolution of an employment dispute.

’Twenty exit payments have been made in the last five financial years of £100,000 or more, of which three quarters were redundancy cases,’ he said.

There were nine such payments in 2014-15, one in 2015-16, three in 2016-17, two in 2017-18 and five in 2018-10.

Of the overall total of 329 exit payments, Mr Thomas said the ’overwhelming majority’ were redundancy or MARS cases.

He added: ’Redundancy payments are governed by the Public Sector Compensation Scheme which was approved by Tynwald in 2014.

’This provides for redundancy payments of up to two years’ salary for staff in post before January 2014; and up to 18 months’ salary for those employed subsequently on the basis of one month’s pay for each year of service.’

In 2015, the UK Government announced plans to cap exit payments at £95,000 but has yet to implement such a scheme and is carrying out a consultation.

Mr Thomas said any UK decision could be a ’trigger’ for the Isle of Man to review its position.

But he expressed surprise when Mr Moorhouse said concern at the pay-outs was amplified because the number of government workers was growing. The Minister said he did not believe the number of public servants was increasing.

Latest figures for the year 2018 -19 show there are 7,390 full time equivalent staff in post across the island’s public service.

This is a fall of 76 on the previous year figure of 7,466 but the number has risen by 111 since 2015, although government employs 439 fewer full time equivalent staff than it did in 2011.

The figure had fallen from 7,829 in 2011 to 7,279 in 2015 but has risen steadily since then.

The total pay bill for contracted staff, including overtime payments and allowances but excluding agency staff, went up from £298.7m in 2013-14 to £344.8m in 2017-18.