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Burned. Sam McBride
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The 2013 consultation document led to the existing non-domestic RHI regulations being amended in several areas – each of which was far less important than the need for cost controls. The fact that this happened shows it would have been straightforward to amend the scheme at that point if the issue had been prioritised. It also proves that the need for cost controls was not somehow overlooked by a team of busy officials. They had not only understood the issue, but had put proposals to the public, which were then consciously not implemented. Stemming from that is an obvious question: given that the problem had been identified and a proposed solution worked out in great detail, why – and on whose instructions – was that proposal abandoned?
Two years later, the then head of DETI’s energy division, John Mills, found himself having to explain to Stormont’s Department of Finance how he had allowed RHI to run out of control with calamitous financial consequences. In the behind-closed-doors meeting – in which minutes were kept, perhaps because by that stage civil servants were now worried about where the blame would fall – he was asked why the 2013 recommendation for budgetary controls was never implemented. Mills claimed that it had been down to a conscious decision by Foster – an explosive allegation, given what was to follow.
Minutes of the meeting recorded him saying that ‘it was a ministerial decision to look at [opening] the domestic scheme rather than pushing through the trigger points [cost controls] on non-domestic which would have significantly delayed the implementation of the domestic scheme’. Mills, a veteran senior civil servant, then repeated that claim in public to an Assembly committee in February 2016, saying that ‘the minister decided that the priority should be on the introduction of the domestic RHI scheme. So resources were devoted to that’. But Foster always robustly disputed that she had ever been presented with a choice about either implementing cost controls or expanding the scheme.
Then, two and a half years after Mills made that potentially career-ending claim about Foster, he retracted it. When called before the public inquiry, which by that stage had uncovered hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation, shedding much more light on the situation than would have been apparent to Mills at the time, he said that there was no evidence to support what had been his belief at the time. His claim about Foster, he said, had been ‘completely incorrect’. Explaining his original comments, Mills said that when he arrived in DETI at the start of 2014 he felt that ‘the course was set’ to expand RHI rather than work on cost controls and he ‘assumed there was some ministerial authority for it’. However, he went on: ‘As part of the inquiry, as I gradually went hunting for what I imagined to be a submission for ministerial approval, I didn’t find one.’ He said that in his view ‘there is no evidence of the minister being asked to make that decision’. Mills accepted that he was ‘at fault’ for not asking to either see a piece of paper in early 2014 showing that the minister had agreed to what was happening or, if that had not happened, then putting a submission to Foster. However, even if Foster never explicitly asked to delay cost controls, her actions may still have – even inadvertently – had that effect. Just as her impatience to get the scheme launched in 2012 appears to have influenced officials to press ahead with what they knew was a flawed scheme, so now the minister’s eagerness to expand the scheme led to her officials believing that it was this which she was keenest to see done first.
Mills said that he made the expansion of the scheme the top priority for those under him in response to Foster’s desire for expansion. During meetings with Foster every six weeks, he recalled that ‘my impression during those discussions was the minister’s disappointment that the domestic RHI scheme was not ready’. Foster and Crawford’s frustration at the delay in launching the domestic RHI is recorded in their own handwriting in this period. On the face of a submission sent to them by Stuart Wightman in September 2014, which proposed that the scheme would launch in November, Crawford wrote: ‘Can we not open the scheme before November 2014?’ On another submission later that month, Crawford wrote by hand: ‘Need to get this launched.’ Two days later, Foster wrote by hand on the same submission: ‘Get this launched ASAP.’ There was unmistakable ministerial urgency to expand RHI – yet no urgency about introducing cost controls. While officials should have done far more to put before Foster the critical need for an emergency brake for the scheme, it is possible to see how they came to believe that her overwhelming priority was expansion in an attempt to increase expenditure – not doing something which might dampen demand.
Mills also said that when he joined the department at the start of 2014:
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