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Burned. Sam McBride
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During probing exchanges at the public inquiry, Foster and Crawford faced ferocious scrutiny of that decision. The inquiry’s technical assessor, Dr Keith MacLean, asked Crawford if there was any point in the officials’ going to the minister ‘if all you’re going to do is tick a box’ to say that if the civil servants were happy with it, then the minister was happy. Crawford candidly admitted that Foster’s signature had been little more than a ‘box-ticking exercise’. In withering comments which implied that Crawford had failed the minister, MacLean – who had worked at the top of the UK energy industry – said: ‘She was also relying on you to give her the advice. I just find it inconceivable in my career that I would ever have put a paper to somebody to sign that they were saying that the costs are justified without having those costs.’ Crawford replied tamely: ‘Well, unfortunately, it was signed off, and I didn’t flag it up at the time.’ When asked if he had considered how much the department was committing itself to in total, Crawford said that he did not think that he had considered a figure for the total cost of the scheme, although he was aware that it was more than the £25 million in the documentation. It wasn’t even the first time that Foster had signed what MacLean referred to as a ‘blank cheque’ for RHI. Earlier in the process, she had signed another document, which stated that the scheme represented good value for taxpayers – yet without any figure for how much it would cost over its lifetime.
When Foster appeared at the inquiry two days after Crawford, senior counsel to the inquiry David Scoffield QC pressed her: ‘But when you’re signing the declaration, which says that you’re satisfied that the benefits justify the costs, you’re putting your signature to that – should you not have thought to yourself, “I need to understand what the costs are?”’ Foster replied: ‘But I did; at that time, I understood that the costs were £25m and the tail [the remainder of the 20 years] was going to be paid so there was no issue for me in terms of was this [money] going to come.’ Perceptively, MacLean jumped in to ask: ‘Is what you’re saying there that whatever the extra cost was, it was going to be covered by the Treasury [so] it didn’t matter?’ Foster responded: ‘Well, it’s not that it didn’t matter; it’s just that we had had the assurance … that [it] was going to be covered by Treasury.’
Foster challenged MacLean’s suggestion that she had signed a blank cheque, arguing that she was aware of the £25 million cost over its first four years. MacLean said: ‘Let’s be generous then, and say it was a cheque for £25 million and not an indeterminate figure; it was not a cheque with the bottom right hand corner number of £445 million which at that time was the best estimate of what that cost was going to be.’ Foster said: ‘I go back to the point that I made in relation to the tail – that we had been assured that this was happening in GB, that it would happen here in a similar fashion.’ MacLean highlighted that ‘the fact that it’s covered doesn’t mean that it’s good value’. He highlighted that Foster was being given ‘precision and detail’ about relatively small figures for the administration costs of the scheme – one figure mentioned was £136,000 – ‘yet not about the total cost’.
But that wasn’t the only problem for Foster at that point. In the submission, which asked her to sign the ‘blank cheque’, Foster was given more misleading information. In a prominent table, the submission set out the proposed tariffs for Stormont’s scheme and the equivalent situation in GB. From that it was obvious that GB had tiering – but tiering was absent from DETI’s proposals. In a small-print footnote on that page, Hepper explained that tiering was used to ensure that a boiler was not ‘over-used just to receive an incentive’. But she copied the consultants’ erroneous claim that ‘tiering is not included in the NI scheme because in each instance the subsidy rate is lower than the incremental fuel cost’.
The scale of the scheme would have been obvious to the minister. She was told that the plan was to keep the scheme open until 2020 but that the last payments would not be made until 2040. Foster was being asked to commit her successors to potentially huge spending on this policy – and spending out of which they would find it exceptionally difficult to wriggle because she was told that tariffs were being ‘grandfathered’. That legal term signified that they were locked in and effectively exempt from a future government rethink where they could be slashed. She was given some comfort that there would be ‘scheduled reviews built-in … to allow DETI to ensure that the scheme remains fit for purpose and value for money for the duration.’ However, the officials’ errors were not picked up by the minister or her adviser – and the apparent view of the ‘box-ticking’ nature of the process does not suggest that she deeply pondered the extent to which the officials’ claims about value for money could possibly be right. That now undermines one of her later boasts. In October 2016 – just over a month before cash for ash would become a vast public scandal and imperil her career – Foster wrote an article for the Slugger O’Toole political blog. It began: ‘Detail is important. For someone from a legal background like myself this is a given.’ The article, which also claimed that the DUP had helped to secure a ‘durable’ system of devolution, now seems like Foster’s point of peak hubris. Despite knowing how she had operated as a Stormont minister, she wrote: ‘Our ascent to the natural party of government doesn’t mean overseeing the paper shuffling’.
Foster would later attempt to blame her civil servants for the entirety of the RHI disaster and not accept that she had made any errors which could have been seen at the time.
But whatever Foster’s failings, it is clear that she was failed by her officials. Hepper’s March 2012 submission, seeking approval for the scheme to proceed, told Foster that ‘under RHI only “useful heat” is deemed eligible; this is defined as heat that would otherwise be met by fossil fuels’. The submission – on the cover of which Foster wrote by hand ‘content’ – added: ‘This excludes deliberately wasting or dumping heat with the sole purpose of claiming incentive payments.’
Missing the ‘blank cheque’ wasn’t the only occasion on which Crawford failed to spot bear pits for his minister. Despite the handpicked spad being paid around £80,000 in the expectation that he would be digging through detail to protect his minister, Crawford admitted that he had not read either of the two CEPA reports for which DETI had paid £100,000 and which formed the basis of the scheme. The spad denied even having been sent the second report – CEPA’s addendum. If that is the case, he did not insist on seeing it. Foster said she believed that Crawford was reading at least the executive summary of reports, such as CEPA’s, but seemed reluctant to criticise the man who had been at her side for most of her ministerial career. When Crawford was asked if he had let the minister down by not reading the reports, he said:
Look, I let; I believe I let; I’m very sorry that I didn’t read it in detail to flag this up … I do not think that there was an expectation there that I should be analysing technical reports and bringing things to her attention which are at odds of [sic] the submission that she is signing. However, look – it is a regret of mine that I didn’t identify this and flag it up.
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But although it might seem that Crawford was neglecting to scrutinise the scheme, there is other evidence of him taking an interest in RHI in this early period. The full picture of how Foster’s spad – who is perhaps the single most significant figure in the entire RHI story – acted in this period is complex. To understand Crawford’s significance to this story, it is necessary to understand the immense power wielded by spads within the devolved Executive. Personal appointees of their ministers, spads were handpicked outside employment