Burned

by Sam McBride

  Foster forwarded that to Dodds, Timothy Johnston and Richard Bullick with the message: ‘I am at the very end of my tether with this individual. He has now put in writing the very serious allegations he has been talking about for sometime [sic]. I think he should be asked to provide evidence forthwith … the very first thing I expect from him is an apology given that he has wilfully ignored my leadership since 3rd March’.

  Johnston entered the discussion, saying that ‘I think he is running out of road’ and ‘he is now putting it in writing knowing he is running out of time. He will be unable to substantiate such claims’. Dodds, who had been in written exchanges with Bell that day, then told Foster and Johnston: ‘It’s interesting that he now decides (after advice??) to pen this lengthy email. Is this his language?? He is on weak ground in not being able to provide corroboration for his allegations so we collectively stand up to him in a coordinated way.’

  There was, at least on Dodds’s part, a suspicion that Bell was being advised by someone. Bell’s closeness to Robinson was well known to all of those on the email but the advice could also be an allusion to a lawyer or perhaps even Ken Cleland. Foster told the inquiry that she had told Bell to come and see her about the issues on 3 March, but he refused ‘and instead went to see … Robinson’.

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  Meanwhile, within DETI a postmortem started over how RHI had run out of control. DETI’s head of internal audit, Michael Woods, was asked to investigate. Woods said that in a career where he worked on about 500 audits, RHI led to ‘the worst opinion I’ve ever had to give’ because in terms of spending public money he found that ‘there’s just no control there’.

  Woods said that even if officials had been right in their belief that the Treasury was funding RHI, ‘you don’t just spend because the money’s there – you spend because it’s justified to spend it’. He added: ‘I think that was lost. The idea that it was [Treasury funding] almost seemed to people to remove the risk – but we are in charge of public money’. He was shocked by the nature of what he found within Energy Division and was concerned at the way in which the officials running RHI cooperated with him. Woods said it was ‘one of the lowest levels of cooperation I’ve experienced’ and led to the department beginning an investigation ahead of potential disciplinary proceedings.

  Wightman said he was ‘completely astounded’ when he heard Woods’s criticisms, and said he had been ‘entirely open, honest and transparent’ with him. He admitted that ‘some of the responses were inadequate and of little utility’ but defended them by saying that he was ‘busy’ at the time.

  Wightman and Hughes did not provide Woods with a copy of the ‘handover note’ given to them on joining DETI, which significantly undermined the story which they were telling Woods at that point. Wightman admitted: ‘I appreciate that it looks to Mr Woods as if relevant information that should have been disclosed to him was withheld. I accept that the handover note was relevant … if I had recalled its existence, I accept that I should have provided it to him, and indeed I would have done so.’ Wightman said that at the time he ‘did not recall the handover note’.

  In March, Woods’s team sent a series of questions to Hughes and Wightman. Among Wightman’s responses to the questions were ‘don’t know’ and ‘no, haven’t asked’ – reinforcing the sense those running RHI were ignorant of key aspects of the scheme, even after it had been shut. Woods told the inquiry: ‘That is the sort of answer that I have never, never seen. I hesitate to laugh, but I’ve never seen a response like that from somebody to an audit question.’

  Wightman admitted that it might be thought that Hughes’s responses were ‘unhelpful’. However, he said that they were ‘not intended to be our full and final response’ and ‘identified gaps in our knowledge’. He claimed that ‘the candid and unvarnished responses’ were ‘indicative of an open and transparent approach by officials’, and there was ‘no attempt to conceal or put any sort of gloss’ on their lack of knowledge.

  In May, Woods reported that ‘the system of risk management, control and governance established by management over the … scheme’ was ‘unacceptable’ – the lowest possible rating. But despite those scathing findings, Wightman and Hughes remained in post managing the RHI fallout. And, despite what was now known of the multiple failures by DETI officials in this period, just after the scheme was shut Wightman recommended that Hughes should receive a bonus for his RHI work. On a ‘Special Bonus Form’, Wightman wrote that ‘over the last four months, Seamus has performed at a level well above that expected of his grade’ in relation to RHI. He said that closure could not have been ‘implemented on time without Seamus’s involvement’. The bonus was approved.

  But by now scrutiny had moved outside the department. The scale of the overspend and the irregular expenditure had been drawn to the attention of the Northern Ireland Audit Office, and it began its own investigation.

  As the Audit Office investigated the scheme, it met DETI’s audit committee in April 2016. The Comptroller and Auditor General, Kieran Donnelly, told the inquiry that one of his senior staff, Tomas Wilkinson, who was at the meeting recalled a striking comment from Mills. Donnelly told the inquiry that Mills had said that even if the subsidies had been excessively generous, ‘the key point was that the money had been available from GB and if the scheme had not been taken up then there would have been a loss of income to Northern Ireland as a whole’. He said that McCormick – who would have been aware of the view the Audit Office would take of such a philosophy – immediately corrected Mills by saying that value for money was critical.

  On 5 July, the Audit Office published an 18-page report on the scheme. For the first time, the public heard that RHI had been burn to earn and that the bill could be more than £1 billion.

  It was also the first public exposure of the note, which George Gallagher had passed to Foster six months earlier, claiming that a farmer was in line to receive £1m over the next 20 years for heating an empty shed. The Audit Office calculated that the overspend would take £140 million from Stormont’s block grant over the next five years, and DETI’s accounts were qualified as a result.

  By now, there had been a reorganisation of Stormont departments and DETI had been reconstituted as the Department for the Economy (DfE). Just two months earlier, Foster had overseen a remarkable election victory, holding the DUP’s all-time record of 38 Assembly seats, while Sinn Féin lost a seat, putting it ten MLAs short of the DUP. Foster removed Bell as minister and appointed the experienced Simon Hamilton to the new department. At the time, it raised eyebrows that despite having the first pick of Stormont departments the DUP had this time – for the first time ever – decided to pick DfE rather than the Department of Finance. Foster said that was because of the importance of the economy, but the decision perhaps also hinted at DUP alarm over what would happen with RHI if another party got to look inside the department.

  Responding to the Audit Office report, Hamilton was contrite, saying: ‘The potential ongoing costs of this scheme to Northern Ireland taxpayers are incredible and the accusations of fraud will be rigorously investigated.’

  Although relations with Bell were privately strained, the DUP presented itself as a ‘family’ and pretended that all was well. In that vein, there was a closing of ranks where protecting the party was more important than the full truth. After the Audit Office report Hamilton told Good Morning Ulster: ‘I would point out that whenever those issues were raised with my predecessor [Jonathan Bell] he stepped in very, very quickly – and whenever the full extent of the cost over-run was understood, he moved very quickly to close the scheme down.’ If Hamilton had even cursorily investigated what happened in the summer of 2015 then he would have known that one word which could not have been used accurately was ‘quickly’.

  Senior DUP colleague Sammy Wilson, a green energy sceptic, implicitly denounced Foster and Bell, saying that ‘in their manic attempts to show how keen they were to save the planet from global
warming, many Assembly members competed with each other to display their green credentials. It was inevitable that the enthusiasm to make sure that Northern Ireland did not fall behind the rest of the UK in promoting RHIs that mistakes would be made.’

  When the scandal became a political crisis, Wilson would adopt a very different tone. On Good Morning Ulster on 16 December – ten days after the Spotlight exposé – Wilson was asked if Foster should apologise for her role in RHI. Incredulous, he replied: ‘For what … what role?’ and went on to ask: ‘What did she do wrong’?

  But behind the scenes as the Audit Office report was emerging, something else was going on. By 4 July – the day before the report was published – Stormont had received an embargoed copy. Foster’s top spad, Johnston, launched his own investigation. In doing so, he tried to cover his tracks, instructing that documents should only be requested over the phone rather than by email, which would leave a written record.

  The spad used private DUP email addresses, rather than departmental accounts, to make the request to his colleagues, meaning that the communication would not have been discoverable unless he or the DUP handed it over. On 4 July, Johnston urgently sought from Hamilton, and his spad, John Robinson, ‘all submissions that were put to Arlene on the RHI scheme by DETI’. He went on to say that ‘we need this material discreetly today and when asking for it do so by phone call and not email’.

  Johnston told the inquiry that he wanted ‘to provide an accurate record so that any comments and statements that were publicly issued … were in fact accurate’ and said that Foster was aware of his activities.

  When asked why he used party email accounts – rather than official government email addresses – Johnston said: ‘This was my practice for all of my period as a special advisor … my department and ministers all knew that had always been the case.’

  That meant that anything done by the DUP’s most powerful backroom figure was off-grid and could not be accessed by the public or the civil service – despite the fact he was being paid £92,000 a year by taxpayers to operate as a temporary civil servant.

  The Audit Office report received widespread media coverage. The Belfast Telegraph front page that day ran a banner headline: ‘Farmer gets £1m of public cash to heat empty shed’. But it was the summer and the Assembly was not in session. Within days the focus turned to the annual Twelfth of July parades and there was a sense that this was just another scandal about government squander – with no one able to be held to account.

  In June 2016, just before the Audit Office report, Janette O’Hagan – who had attempted to raise the alarm three years earlier – emailed the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown. O’Hagan suggested that her energy-efficiency product could save the hotel money, make it more efficient and more comfortable. The hotel’s owner, Michael McElhatton, said: ‘Can’t guarantee you any business [because] we are currently operation [sic] on biomass and to be honest the way it operates the more pellets we burn the more RHI we get paid.’

  The following month, after the publication of the Audit Office report, O’Hagan emailed Green Party leader Steven Agnew. In the course of her email, she said:

  To give you a bit of an insight, a few weeks ago in early June I had went [sic] to Cookstown and called in at three hotels and an office, trying to tell them how I could save them 30% of their heating costs. All four had biomass boilers (apparently it was a ‘too good to miss out on scheme’) – it was more than 20 degrees outside and all of them had their heating on with the windows open because, as they’ll openly tell you themselves, the more that they use, the more they earn and they definitely don’t want to start being efficient. One small hotel – that only has 11 bedrooms – told me that he made £5–6k profit last year on their RHI payments (after all pellets had been paid for), so it’s easy to see how that will drain the province of millions over the next 20 years.

  The RHI list published in March 2017 points to the Greenvale Hotel not running its boiler around the clock. The one 99kw boiler listed for the hotel’s parent company, Tobin Ltd, had claimed £34,290 over a 15-month period – indicating that it was running for about half of the total hours in a year.

  McElhatton said he had in 2016 spent £90,000 on switching from a diesel boiler to biomass, and the new boiler ‘has at all times operated exactly as the old boiler, with thermostatic controls in all rooms for the comfort of guests. There was never any change to how the hotel operated as a result of a different boiler.’

  Referring to the claim of unspecified hotels in the area running boilers in June while the windows were open, he said that ‘under no circumstances could – or would – this ever have been the case at the Greenvale’ and ‘the suggestion that guests would be subjected to this sort of environment in any hospitality setting does not ring true’.

  The businessman said that Ofgem inspectors had visited the hotel and found that its boiler was operating ‘in full compliance of all regulations and completely in the spirit of the scheme’.

  By September, the Assembly was back and its powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC) launched an investigation into RHI, a common step after an Audit Office report. The decision was taken unanimously by the cross-party committee. Its chairman, Ulster Unionist MLA Robin Swann, recalled that there was ‘no real political kickback from the DUP until Arlene Foster’s name appeared – because until then it looked like it was all the civil service’s fault’.

  A turning point came in October when the department discovered O’Hagan’s emails from 2013. The committee agreed that a cross-party delegation would visit O’Hagan to hear her story. It was a highly unusual move which demonstrated how immediately seriously the MLAs were taking the revelation. She handed over the emails which she had sent to Foster and to the department. However, on the day that MLAs were to meet O’Hagan, the DUP MLA who was meant to attend failed to show up. That would later put the DUP at a disadvantage as it attempted to respond to questions about O’Hagan’s emails without a clear picture of what she was saying.

  Swann said that throughout the entire process of O’Hagan speaking – without being named – to the BBC in December 2016 and then coming before the inquiry, ‘her story never deviated’ from what she told MLAs that day. Swann said that at this point, with Foster becoming more closely associated with the scheme, he saw the committee ‘start to get slightly political’, despite the fact that its role in scrutinising public expenditure is such that MLAs are meant to set aside their party allegiances.

  Swann was resolutely apolitical in his role as committee chairman, even tangling with his deputy – SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan – when McCrossan got into a row with a DUP MLA at the committee. That stood out because the SDLP had by this stage joined the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in forming Stormont’s first official opposition since 1972.

  By the time the scandal erupted with the BBC Spotlight programme on 6 December, the committee had held six lengthy evidence sessions. After the sudden explosion of publicity in December there was some criticism of MLAs for not doing enough to uncover the issues themselves. But in truth much of what emerged came through the work of the Audit Office and Swann’s committee. What ends up in a television programme or on a newspaper front page often starts its life in a half-empty committee room.

  Although the committee hearings were receiving limited publicity, they were being reported by two journalists – David Young of the Press Association, who came up with the phrase ‘cash for ash’, and BBC NI’s Conor Macauley. But, as sometimes happens with important stories, their reports received limited attention.

  Alongside the PAC hearings, there was another committee hearing in this period which would be hugely significant. The Assembly Finance Committee was investigating allegations that Sinn Féin had ‘coached’ the loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson before a major evidence session the previous year.

  Sinn Féin’s Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who had been a committee member when Bryson made the allegation but by now was the Finance Minister,
was being pressed by Bell, now a member of the committee. Under pressure, Ó Muilleoir spent several minutes attacking Bell over RHI in an attempt to divert from his line of questioning. He said: ‘No one did more damage to our finances than Jonathan Bell through the renewable heat incentive, and I am cleaning up his mess.’

  Various sources have pointed to this as the moment when Bell became worried that the DUP and Sinn Féin – now in a close Stormont alliance – were going to make him the scapegoat for RHI.

  In late October, John Manley of The Irish News was interviewing Foster ahead of the DUP conference when he asked about RHI. Few people had made the link between RHI and Foster, who was at the peak of her popularity. Under the front page headline ‘Foster washes hands of £1bn subsidies scandal’, the paper reported: ‘Mrs Foster says she accepts no responsibility for the scheme’s shortcomings because ‘it was developed by officials in a way that shouldn’t have been developed by officials’, and said she was not responsible for ‘every single jot and tittle’ within her department. It was the start of a long pattern of Foster refusing to accept any responsibility for the scheme which, when she believed it was popular, she had proudly presented as her own.

  CHAPTER 17

  SPOTLIGHT

  Conor Spackman woke on the morning of 5 July 2016, turned on his radio and heard something which would lead to him playing a key role in the collapse of Northern Ireland’s government six months later.

  On Good Morning Ulster, BBC Radio Ulster’s flagship morning news programme, DUP Economy Minister Simon Hamilton was being questioned about the Audit Office report into RHI. Although he was on holiday, the journalist in Spackman was struck by one phrase from the DUP minister. Explaining how the RHI mess had developed on the watch of successive DUP ministers, Hamilton said: ‘It doesn’t serve us well to get into the politics of this. It’s clear from the mountain of evidence that I have looked at that ministers weren’t warned by officials of any issues or risks which subsequently emerged.’