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Burned. Sam McBride
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But many years later, at the public inquiry which would dissect the inner workings of Stormont like never before, the independence of that report came under scrutiny. There has long been a suspicion that civil servants sometimes hire consultants because they want an apparently independent voice to advise them to do what the officials wanted to do anyway. The inquiry revealed a level of departmental involvement in writing the report, which was not publicly apparent at the time.
Initially, the consultants sent DETI a draft version of their report. But after discussions with DETI officials they made changes to that document. In response to that changed version of the report, civil servant Alison Clydesdale, head of DETI’s sustainable energy branch, emailed the consultants in May 2010 to say that the report was now ‘closer to what we need’. But she went on to make a series of suggestions for further changes. One of the requests was to alter what the consultants were recommending should be done to incentivise renewable heat. Clydesdale wrote: ‘We would need something stronger than “some form of incentive”.’ She went on to make a series of suggestions and told the specialist engineering consultancy: ‘I’m not sure about saying that geothermal energy should be prioritised and supported over other resources – perhaps you could think about some rewording here … this wording could present difficulties going forward.’ Four days later, senior AECOM consultant Andrew Turton replied to say: ‘Please find attached the latest version of the report with the changes as requested — I hope these are now as desired!’
Having at the request of the department scored out ‘some form of incentive will be required’, the consultants then replaced it with what would be the report’s key recommendation: ‘The GB scheme appears to be inefficient for Northern Ireland … Northern Ireland needs to develop a NI specific incentive scheme.’ It seems clear that the department influenced that key recommendation, even though it had already assured the Assembly that the report would be an entirely ‘independent assessment’. However, the report presented that as a means of being less generous – not more generous – than what was being planned in GB.
Intriguingly, Turton’s initial report had contained a recommendation to review the GB RHI scheme once it started, and to ‘monitor the cost-effectiveness of the incentives through applications supported’. That was also scored out. The failure to either monitor what was going on in GB or to keep a close watch on the cost of the scheme would be two crucial areas which would make it possible for the costs of Stormont’s scheme to escalate rapidly. Why had someone chosen to remove that part of the report?
Rather than have the confidence to take the experts’ advice and then make its own decisions, DETI appeared to be wanting to steer the consultants towards telling it what it wanted to hear in certain areas. At the inquiry, Clydesdale defended her actions, insisting that much of what she had done was ‘correcting the report and correcting inaccuracies’. At the time, Foster presented the report to the Assembly as being based on ‘reliable data’ and that it had ‘considered appropriate methods of incentivisation’, something she said was ‘absolutely vital to ensure that future policy decisions regarding the incentivisation of renewable heat are based on sound evidence’.
In a September 2010 letter to the Assembly committee which scrutinised her department, Foster said: ‘I can assure you that I am committed to developing the renewable heat market in Northern Ireland and see many benefits in doing so.’ That personal commitment to RHI and a desire to be associated with it would mark many of Foster’s pronouncements when she thought the policy was popular. Once it began to implode, the minister suddenly became very keen to stress how limited her involvement had been.
Once the report was agreed between the consultants and the department, one of Hepper’s first tasks was to get her team to summarise it for the minister. On Hepper’s advice, Foster issued a press release in September 2010 to reassure those pressing for a renewable heat subsidy that Stormont was planning to follow what had happened in the rest of the UK by setting up its own incentive scheme.
By the time Hepper arrived, the need to get a renewable heat subsidy launched was also being driven by the fact that Westminster had made available to Northern Ireland a pot of £25 million for four years from 2011, which could only be spent once a Stormont scheme was launched. That was unusual in government spending. Generally, a need would be identified which would have a certain cost and then the budget would be found. But here the cart came before the horse, with money being made available and Stormont finding itself under pressure to spend it. From the outset, the central concern for some in Stormont was that the money might not be spent in Northern Ireland.
Two years after her arrival, by which time the scheme was still six months from being launched, Hepper emailed her minister’s special adviser (spad), Andrew Crawford, a figure who from early on appeared to have taken a particular interest in the scheme. In that email she referred to the ‘exceptional circumstances’ as a result of ‘the pressure to spend the Treasury money or lose it’.
As decisions were being taken about how the scheme would operate, one central preoccupation of those designing the scheme was that it would see as much of the available money spent as possible. Even if there was no deliberate desire to overspend because of a belief that it was all Treasury money, the ambition to spend as much of the available budget as possible was always going to conflict with what taxpayers might assume would be a desire to spend as little of their money as possible in order to achieve the desired goal.
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Under devolution, senior members of the Northern Ireland Civil Service were unusually keen to satisfy their political masters. Having for decades operated under direct rule ministers from Westminster, many of whom spent limited time in Northern Ireland, suddenly civil servants found themselves reporting to ministers who had firm ideas about what should be done.
Looking at the political landscape, even civil servants with stunted political antennae would have realised that the DUP and Sinn Féin were likely to be in charge for a very long time. In that context, many civil servants bent over backwards to please their ministers. Some officials were reluctant to give their minister bad news. But in some cases, this was not necessarily in the politician’s interest.
In November 2008, four years before RHI would be launched, Hepper’s predecessor as head of energy division, Jenny Pyper, was sent a memo by a subordinate. In it, Pyper was reminded that when they had opted out of the UK-wide RHI scheme, she had sent a submission to the minister on the issue but they had taken out a paragraph saying that DETI ‘cannot hope to develop this area of work with current resources’. Years later, when they were asked to explain how the debacle had started, civil servants would claim that they had inadequate resources to set up the RHI scheme Foster asked them to create – and Foster would say that she had never been told of the extent of the staffing difficulties in energy division.
Just five days before that memo, Pyper – who would go on to become the Northern Ireland Utility Regulator – received another memo from an official who alluded to the glacial pace of Stormont’s own thinking on incentivising renewable heat. Referring to a Whitehall document to which DETI had been invited to contribute, they said: ‘I am finding it hard to find something positive to say on heat, so it is not mentioned specifically.’
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By her own admission, Hepper was ‘not an energy expert’. Nor were those around her in the team designing the RHI scheme. Joanne McCutcheon, the part-time official who headed up the renewable heat branch, came from a telecoms background. Completing the tiny team was Peter Hutchinson, a relatively junior official who had joined the civil service five years earlier, graduating with an arts degree before grappling with the complexities of biomass boilers, air source heat pumps, photovoltaic panels and tariff methodologies. Like the others, Hutchinson was a generalist, who had come straight into DETI from university. But Hepper had no qualms about the team, taking the view that they would ‘learn on the job’. After all, it was how the Northern Ireland Civil Service – and to a large extent, its Whitehall equivalent – had operated for longer than anyone could recall.
However,