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Burned. Sam McBride
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Four days later, the regulations came before the entire Assembly where any one of the 108 MLAs had the chance to question what was happening. In a brief 460-word speech, Foster gave little of the key detail about how the scheme would operate. But she did talk about ‘my department’, ‘my commitment to the sector’ and ‘my desire to see levels of renewable heating increase’. Her comments were typical of how many Stormont ministers – but particularly Foster – liked to operate. The minister was eager to be associated with a scheme, which she thought would be politically popular, rather than modestly pointing out – as she would later claim – that most of the significant work was done by her officials.
Speaking on behalf of the scrutiny committee, Patsy McGlone, its Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) chairman, welcomed the scheme but said that ‘some concerns have been expressed that the tariffs for the renewable heat incentive are lower than those in Britain’. He claimed that the committee’s scrutiny of the proposal had been ‘considerable and reflects the importance and long-term nature of the proposals’. And he went on to pledge that the committee ‘will pay particular attention to the reviews, and it will scrutinise the implementation of the scheme’, something it would fail to do.
However, although those comments turned out to be an embarrassing overstatement of the committee’s largely acquiescent role in the process, McGlone did raise the fact that the green energy charity Action Renewables had expressed concerns that the ‘rates and bands for biomass could create a distortion in the market and lead to applicants installing boilers with a smaller than required capacity’. McGlone’s support for Foster’s scheme was surpassed by one of the DUP members of his committee, who was positively gushing about RHI. Robin Newton, who would go on to become a highly controversial Speaker of the Assembly, told the chamber that it was ‘a good news story’ in ‘an area where, I believe, we are often maligned, and I do not believe that that maligning is justified’. In remarks which are now excruciating to read, Newton said: ‘This project is leading us down a road, and I believe that, when we reach the final stage, the economy of Northern Ireland will have benefited significantly from the steps that the minister has taken.’
Sandra Overend for the Ulster Unionist Party referred to CEPA’s report – sections of which were dangerous garbage and with tables where the numbers did not add up – and enthused that it had ‘undoubtedly been invaluable in informing decision-makers on the best way forward’. The only other speakers in what could not accurately be described as a debate were Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle, Green MLA Steven Agnew and Sinn Féin’s Phil Flanagan, each of whom also welcomed the scheme. Without a single dissenting voice, The Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012 passed their final legislative hurdle and became law. But there was a remarkable fact which went unrealised by everyone in the Assembly chamber that day: Foster had not even read the legislation which she was asking MLAs to vote into law. The minister made the admission almost six years later when being grilled by the public inquiry. In a revelation which left some of her DUP colleagues slack-jawed in disbelief, Foster casually said that she had ‘definitely not’ read the regulations.
Under questioning about a deficiency in the regulations whereby they did not adequately define ‘useful heat’ eligible for subsidy, making it more difficult to crack down on potentially fraudulent claims, Foster said that she ‘imagined it would have been defined in the legislation’. When asked if she had at any stage read the regulations, Mrs Foster said: ‘No. No, I didn’t. So there’s … absolutely not. I didn’t read the regulations.’ David Scoffield QC for the inquiry asked Foster if she would have read the regulations when she brought them to the Assembly for approval. She said: ‘No, I don’t believe I would have read them at that stage. I probably would have only read the explanatory note, but not the regulations involved.’
The clarity of Foster’s recollection about not reading the legislation was striking because that day at the inquiry she had repeatedly used phrases such as ‘I don’t remember’, ‘I can’t recall’ and ‘I don’t think I have any clear recollection’ about key meetings from 2012 which went unrecorded. The tone with which she spoke and her body language conveyed no embarrassment at the admission that as a government minister she had not read a piece of legislation tabled in her name and which she was asking MLAs to endorse.
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Given the centrality of Crawford to this story, there is an intriguing footnote about this period. Before joining the DUP staff team in 2004, Crawford had worked for two years as a policy officer for the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU).
His time at the UFU – a body with major political clout in Northern Ireland – coincided with the two-year tenure of a Londonderry farmer, John Gilliland, who had been elected as the union’s youngest-ever president at the age of 36. Gilliland was a green energy pioneer who specialised in biomass, running boilers on his farm long before RHI and growing willow, which was turned into wood chip to be burned in biomass heating systems. He was no stranger to politicians, having stood as a unique independent candidate in the 2004 European elections with the backing of the Alliance Party, the Workers’ Party and a rainbow coalition of other smaller parties. Foster told the inquiry that she knew that Crawford and Gilliland ‘would have known each other for quite some time’.
In spring 2011, Gilliand wrote to Foster about his ‘favourite bug bear, a Northern Ireland Renewable Heat Incentive’. He relayed how David Dobbin, the chief executive of major Northern Ireland milk processor, Dale Farm, had said that the delay in launching RHI ‘was severely undermining the Northern Ireland dairy industry’s competitiveness against his GB competitors’. The correspondence shows that Foster was being personally contacted about RHI and therefore presumably was asking internal questions about it in order to be able to respond. Gilliland met Foster and Crawford at DETI’s Belfast headquarters in August 2011 to discuss RHI. Without a minute of the meeting, it is unclear what exactly was said. But it is clear that Gilliland was pushing the minister to get the scheme launched.
Although a committed environmentalist, Gilliland had more pressing personal reasons to secure the subsidy. In 1996 he had set up Rural Generation Limited, a research and development company exploring uses for wood chip, and the company had gone on to sell biomass boilers. In 2009, the firm had installed a biomass boiler at Stormont Castle.
But as the long-delayed RHI remained uncertain, the firm struggled to stay afloat and cashflow dried up in late 2012. On 2 November the company was wound up. Gilliland was interviewed by the Irish Farmers Journal and that day the journalist contacted DETI to ask for a comment from Foster. None arrived. However, he was advised to look for a public statement from the minister the next day. On the morning of 3 November, Foster announced that Stormont’s RHI scheme was finally opening. Crawford phoned Gilliland that night and commiserated with him over the demise of Rural Generation Ltd. Gilliland later recalled that the spad had ‘encouraged me to get back up on my feet and said pioneers such as myself would be required to deliver this new policy on renewable heat’. What the public did not know was that even though Foster was inviting applications to her shiny new scheme, there was no one to accept those applications. In DETI’s haste to open RHI, it had done so before finalising terms with Ofgem to administer the scheme. Hepper told the inquiry that the department had a ‘line in the sand’ date for launch and was determined to do so. The small matter of not having anyone to run the scheme was not going to stand in DETI’s way.
DETI was now in a weak position to negotiate Ofgem’s fees. A huge increase in the administration costs left Hepper furious, but there was no one else to run RHI and it had already been opened. Eventually, they settled on a compromise figure. But there were a series of unresolved issues which would lead to disputes down the line. It would later also become clear that Ofgem was planning to inspect only a tiny handful of RHI installations – something