ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Burned. Sam McBride
Читать онлайн.
The situation exposed a fundamental weakness for government departments largely staffed by generalists: they were hiring in outside consultants because officials lacked expertise to do the work, yet those same civil servants would be the ones scrutinising the work for deficiencies. The absence of internal specialists meant that there was always the potential that the consultants would bamboozle the client with apparently detailed analysis, with the department lacking the cognitive clout to query the report.
Later, CEPA would claim that when it was given the contract it had less expertise in renewable heat than the department that hired it. The global consultancy firm’s director, Mark Cockburn, said: ‘we were learning a new area as we went along’, and as a result it had sub-contracted part of the work to another consultancy, AEA. It was the partially sighted leading the partially sighted and ultimately both would see their reputations damaged as a result of the arrangement.
Seven years later, Cockburn told the public inquiry that ‘I don’t think we had many conversations’ about the risk of the subsidy being overly generous. At that point, he said, the emphasis was to design a scheme, which was sufficiently attractive to encourage uptake, with the idea that it would be giving claimants too much money regarded as ‘a very remote possibility’. The desire to make a green energy scheme generous, rather than Stormont using its powers to pare back Westminster’s approach, was at first glance curious. The DUP – which held the energy portfolio for the unbroken decade in which devolution operated from 2007 to 2017 – was at best sceptical about green energy.
Prominent DUP politicians were firmly opposed to any environmental subsidies. Their reasons ranged from opposition to overburdening taxpayers to a belief that global warming was not caused by human activity.
The most outspoken critic was Sammy Wilson, the Finance Minister at the time when RHI was set up. In one of his frequent forays against environmentalists, the East Antrim representative denounced ‘the high priests of the new global warming religion’ for foisting high energy prices on the public.
But while Wilson was steeped in the DUP, with enough outspoken comments to fill an encyclopaedia, Foster was a very different figure. The epitome of the New DUP, she had spent years in the Ulster Unionist Party before defecting to the DUP in 2004 as the balance of power within unionism decisively shifted in favour of the party founded by Ian Paisley. Largely eschewing the heady rhetoric of the likes of Wilson, she became a Stormont minister in 2007 and cultivated a reputation for tough pragmatism with a desire to be seen to be attentive to the business community.
That circumspection meant that she was never given to the sort of controversial pronouncements on climate change, which the Finance Minister relished. But she had not endeared herself to environmental groups either. They were furious when in 2008 Foster, the then Environment Minister, rejected the case for an independent environmental protection agency, leaving Northern Ireland the only part of the UK and Ireland without such a body. So any decision to create a green energy subsidy more generous in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK would not have been expected under a DUP minister – unless there was some secondary benefit which they could see. Given the scale of the catastrophe that was to follow, some people would look back at what had happened during the design of the RHI scheme and wonder if someone in the DUP had not been primarily thinking about the environment at that point but had spotted the potential to supplement Stormont’s budget by the back door.
CHAPTER 3
LET’S SPEND BIG
In late June 2011, consultants CEPA delivered their verdict on how Stormont should incentivise renewable heat. Except, bafflingly, they didn’t. The company, which would be paid about £100,000 to advise DETI on how to encourage green heating systems, delivered a report which did not fulfil their central contractual obligation.
Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.
On three separate occasions throughout the 145-page report, CEPA said: ‘the challenge fund delivers the most renewable heat, at the lowest cost’. The report did say that an RHI scheme would have other benefits – such as providing a long-term signal to the renewables industry and encouraging people to use their boilers, rather than simply install them and revert to fossil fuels – but was clear that such a scheme would be ‘significantly more expensive over the long term’. CEPA calculated that an RHI scheme would cost about £200 million more than the challenge fund. It wasn’t even close.
But then, having said that, the report made no recommendation. To anyone who might have studied the report, it was a strange outcome – but all was not as it seemed. Behind the scenes, CEPA felt that the department had steered it away from saying what it really thought.
Private emails from six years later – by which point CEPA was preparing to face the public inquiry into a scandal in which it had played a crucial role – helped unravel the mystery of how the consultants delivered a report, which did not meet their contractual obligations. Yet, the civil servants seemed happy with it and agreed to pay them £100,000 without quibble.
In one email, Iain Morrow, a former CEPA employee who had been heavily involved in writing the report, told the consultancy’s director, Mark Cockburn, that in 2011 it had been ‘clear that DETI wanted an RHI’ – a 20-year expensive scheme – rather than any other proposal. In the email, which the inquiry compelled the company to release, he went on:
They would have liked us to recommend an RHI, but we felt, I think, that we couldn’t make the judgement for them about whether their internal issues made a challenge fund unworkable. So, we agreed with them that the report would not make a firm recommendation. I seem to remember that this wasn’t something they accepted easily. They wanted us to make a recommendation, but we said that it could only be to do a challenge fund, which they didn’t want.
Sitting before the public inquiry in 2017, Cockburn admitted that ‘there probably was some negotiation over what the final position would be’. He was pressed by inquiry chairman Sir Patrick Coghlin as to why CEPA had not directly recommended what it believed was the best option. The consultant replied that because of DETI’s views ‘we might have had to be a bit more nuanced about it.’ Coghlin asked: ‘Why would you have to be more nuanced if you have integrity about your reputation?’ The middle-aged Cambridge economics graduate implied that his view of the independence of CEPA was rather different to how the company had originally described it. Readers of CEPA’s 2011 report were informed that it had carried out an ‘independent economic appraisal’. Cockburn suggested that he did not think CEPA should overly rock the boat by recommending something which might be awkward for the client ‘if they didn’t feel comfortable with it’.
The image, which emerged from the inquiry, was of a ventriloquist consultant who – in exchange for a large sum of money – was essentially echoing back to DETI elements of what it wanted to hear. Although it was perhaps not prepared to do whatever the client wanted – and did not recommend an RHI scheme – CEPA was willing to substantially fudge its professional opinion purely because those paying it wanted that to happen.
Arlene Foster’s spad, Andrew Crawford, told the inquiry that when he looked back on the period he was baffled as to the apparent predisposition of officials