Tynwald voted to set up a select committee into the blight of poverty.

Speaker Juan Watterson called for a focused committee to look at definitions of poverty, investigate the underlying causes and assess the policies, programmes and measures in place to tackle the problem.

He told Tynwald: ’Poverty blights lives and it would be wrong to assume that in an affluent society like the Isle of Man that poverty does not exist. What we need is a definition of poverty. We may need more than one. We owe it to all of our citizens to define the problem and tackle it. If we fail to define the problem then we never know if we have succeeded in tackling it.’

Policy and Reform Minister Chris Thomas tabled an amendment, calling for the inquiry to be carried out by the standing social affairs policy review committee.

He insisted there was a range of policy actions in the Programme for Government over which he said he was ’not getting defensive about defending’. ’All I’m saying is that they are there and being worked through right at this minute,’ he said.

Douglas East MHK Chris Robertshaw suggested the the Council of Ministers was ’drifting into a defensive stance’, indicating that Tynwald should not interfere in the Programme for Government.

Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan, seconding the amendment, said: ’This is not some sort of CoMin adversarial approach - this is about trying to ensure we get the best outcome for government. There is a huge amount of work streams going on in this area, not just generated from the Programme for Government.’

He said CoMin had a determination to address ’wrongs that had occurred’ in relation to changes to fiscal policies that had taken place following the 2008 economic crash which had impacted on those on low incomes. ’We have an absolute duty to focus on those that are less well-off.’

The CoMin amendment failed to carry, and the main motion was voted through unanimously.