by Sam McBride
Spackman, a reporter with BBC Northern Ireland’s respected Spotlight investigative unit, couldn’t get the phrase out of his head. He sought out the Audit Office report and immediately realised that this was a huge story.
A few days later, over dinner he told friends: ‘You’ve never seen anything like this in your life.’
Though he did not know it at the time, the 36-year-old reporter, who had arrived at Spotlight just ten months earlier, was on to the biggest story of his career.
By September, the Spotlight team were closely following the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) sessions investigating RHI. Spackman’s producer, Richard Newman, watched the first mammoth hearing at which much of the eye-watering detail of what had gone on tumbled out.
Fronting up for the department was Andrew McCormick and it was his unusual contrition which jumped out at the watching journalist. McCormick was verbally clothed in sackcloth and ashes, telling the committee ‘there is no good answer to that’, ‘there is no good explanation’, ‘we do not understand why’ and describing how the department designed the scheme in a way that was ‘bizarre’. This was far beyond the normal perfunctory apologies from mandarins.
Spotlight investigations tended to be slow accumulations of material and sources, and there was no rush to air. The following month, the investigation assumed increased political significance when Spackman spoke to a source who told him that a whistleblower had contacted Arlene Foster personally. He obtained the email, something which would become Spotlight’s central new revelation.
The team was investigating allegations about DUP spads Stephen Brimstone and Andrew Crawford, but they never featured in the programme. Extensive right of reply questions were sent in writing to Foster in October – the month before Brimstone left his post as Foster’s spad.
And queries were also going to senior civil servants, something which discomfited mandarins not used to facing tough media questions. Having received little more than stock responses from officials – who said that it ‘would not be appropriate’ to talk to Spotlight while the PAC was conducting its own inquiry, Spackman visited some of them at their homes in an attempt to understand what had really gone on.
In response, senior civil servants showed greater alacrity in lodging a formal complaint with the BBC than they had done in addressing any of the problems with RHI. The visit to Fiona Hepper’s upmarket Cherryvalley home in the leafy East Belfast suburbs led to a particular fightback.
Stormont’s most senior civil servants – including the Head of the Civil Service, Sir Malcolm McKibbin – worked on drafts of a letter of complaint which was sent by their press office to BBC NI’s controller, Peter Johnston, complaining about ‘this incident of intrusion and infringement’. That was unusual because it involved the most senior civil servant and his deputies in what at a glance would have seemed to be a trivial case of a journalist approaching someone and asking them questions.
But it was unusual for a second reason – by taking the complaint to the most senior BBC figure in Northern Ireland, the mandarins were not just going over his head, but over the head of his boss Jeremy Adams, the editor of Spotlight who was feared by the powerful and respected by his peers due to his programme’s consistently robust investigations.
BBC NI’s controller dismissed the complaint, highlighting that the reporter and his producer had been ‘acting with proper editorial authority and consistent with relevant BBC guidelines’. He said the claim that they had been involved in ‘doorstepping’ Hepper was wrong because they did not seek to confront or record the official and did not even have a camera. Rather, he said that they asked Hepper whether she would like to help with their journalistic enquiries.
On 24 November 2016 – less than two weeks before the Spotlight programme was aired – there was some intriguing contact between Crawford and Mark Anderson, his friend who was a biomass expert at Ulster University.
Apparently responding to a question from Crawford about written communications between them about RHI, Anderson emailed to say there was ‘very little on email :)’. The smiley face suggested that he, and presumably Crawford, were pleased that there was little written record of whatever they had discussed.
At the inquiry, Crawford said that the message was in the context of a discussion about Anderson applying for a new job. Anderson would soon leave his university role to work for a major RHI beneficiary, the wood pellet supplier Balcas.
Although the sender of the email, Anderson, handed it over to the inquiry, the recipient, Crawford, did not. Nor did Crawford hand over other prior emails between the pair. When asked about that, Crawford said that ‘from time to time I deleted emails relating to RHI’.
But it was not the only time that Anderson appears to have been concerned about what he had written down about RHI.
Electronic communications which Sir Patrick Coghlin’s inquiry compelled revealed that six weeks after the Crawford–Anderson communication about what RHI material was held on email, Anderson sent a message to a public servant.
The 3 January 2017 WhatsApp message – to Chris Johnston, the head of the Environment and Renewable Energy Centre at the Department of Agriculture’s Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute – said: ‘Some time you have five minutes, will you check your emails from July 15 to September 15 to see if you have anything on the closure of the RHI?’
On 20 July 2017, Anderson sent another WhatsApp message to Johnston which said: ‘Please don’t put the letters RHI in my emails any more’. The timing of that message alluded to why it had been sent – just three days earlier, the inquiry had written to Anderson and asked him to hand over all material relevant to RHI.
When called before the inquiry, Johnston accepted that he believed the request to be an attempt to prevent material going to the inquiry.
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Given what several senior DUP figures knew about their role in RHI, when Spotlight came to air, they had cause for relief.
Most of what it reported was in journalistic parlance ‘old news’. But it was a programme which demonstrated how mistaken journalists can be in the belief that the best journalism has to involve major new revelations. Instead, it was a masterful simplification of a complex story which visually enraged the viewer. Newman, the producer, had the idea of literally burning money to bring home to taxpayers what the scheme meant for them.
And it was that image – filmed in Crawfordsburn Country Park on the shores of Belfast Lough – which gripped viewers. Sitting in the winter dark by a fire, Spackman casually tossed £20 note after £20 note – and then entire bundles of cash – into the fire as he impassively told viewers about the wild incompetence of their representatives.
The programme began with the reporter sitting in a Belfast bar as he delivered his opening piece to camera in the relaxed style of speaking to a friend in the pub:
Did you hear the one about the Renewable Heat Incentive? A government scheme that went hugely over budget. It was supposed to be a green scheme, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, but as well as being economically disastrous it actually ended up being damaging to the environment. There was a series of extraordinary blunders, and because of those blunders we’re likely to spend the next 20 years picking up a tab of hundreds of millions of pounds.
John Simpson, a respected veteran economist who had worked at senior levels in the public sector, told the programme that it may be ‘the biggest financial penalty imposed on taxpayers in Northern Ireland that has occurred in my lifetime’.
He described it as a ‘heads you win, tails you can’t lose, type situation’ for boiler owners. Images from a thermal camera were red hot, showing how much heat was being generated – and paid for by viewers – in poultry sheds heated under the scheme.
The half-hour programme ended with a devastating sign-off from Spackman about the anticipated RHI overspend: ‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh H
ospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses, the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’
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The programme had featured one individual who unwittingly as he set out how disastrous RHI had been was building a trap into which he would himself fall.
Michael Doran, who described himself as ‘the foremost authority in Northern Ireland on renewable energy’, was chief executive of Action Renewables, a green energy charity which had been set up by Stormont but subsequently became independent of government.
Spotlight had contacted him because of his expertise and he agreed to be filmed explaining the scheme’s fundamental flaws. The silver-haired businessman explained: ‘What they do is they pay you an amount for the heat that you generate. What’s actually happened here is that they’ve set a rate which is higher than the cost of the fuel in the boiler therefore you’re actually incentivised to run the boiler for as many hours as possible.’
An incredulous Spackman asked him: ‘In other words, in this scheme the more you burn the more you earn?’ The bespeckled and softly spoken Doran replied: ‘Basically yes.’ When the reporter put to him that it ‘sounds like a really fundamental cock up’, Doran replied: ‘Yes it is.’
But the following month – as Northern Ireland continued to be gripped by the scandal – The Irish News revealed that Doran’s organisation had processed about 550 RHI applications. That commercial service saw Action Renewables take in almost £400,000.
When asked by the newspaper why no one within the charity relayed concerns about the scheme to DETI, Doran argued that to do so would have been ‘ethically improper’ because businesses were paying his charity to get them on the scheme. In a change of tone from his interview with Spotlight, Doran went on to say: ‘The fact that the government created the scheme that some people now think is over incentivised is not our responsibility.’
Those comments led to a complaint to the Charity Commission that Action Renewables had been acting improperly. But, after speaking to Doran and other trustees, the commission received assurances which led it to reject the complaint.
However, more than a year later Doran appeared before the RHI Inquiry. During a day of devastating evidence, he emerged as someone who knew far more about the flaws in RHI than he had publicly suggested until that point.
Pressed by inquiry counsel Donal Lunny, he accepted it was ‘possible’ he had given evidence to the Charity Commission which was the opposite of what he had given under oath to the inquiry. Coghlin said it seemed an ‘inescapable inference you were misleading the charity commissioners’. Doran paused before saying: ‘It would appear from this document, yes.’
The inquiry also revealed how Action Renewables not only knew about RHI’s perverse incentive and kept quiet – the charity actually explained to a business how RHI could be abused and informed it that to deliberately run boilers just to get public money ‘is not wrong’. Those comments were made in reports which were funded by taxpayers and commissioned by Invest NI in an attempt to encourage energy efficiency.
The inquiry was suspicious of the fact that Action Renewables initially did not hand over the reports when ordered to do so by the inquiry and only produced them two days before Doran’s appearance.
In one report drawn up for a company, Action Renewables said that RHI payments ‘artificially encourage larger biomass systems to be installed … these systems are operated longer than necessary, generating more heat and making more significant returns on investment … whilst this philosophy is not wrong, it is not considered the most cost-effective, due to higher capital outlay’.
Confronted with that, Doran accepted it was ‘incorrect’ and said such a philosophy ‘is not only wrong; it’s possibly also illegal’, but insisted he had not been recommending it. Although the reports never suggested businesses should abuse the scheme, they showed a detailed understanding of how eye-wateringly lucrative RHI was. On one occasion, the charity set out considerable detail of how to ‘maximise return from the RHI’ as opposed to using the most efficient heater. In another report, it calculated that RHI was so generous it would see payback in just 1.7 years – with the high payments to go on for another 18.3 years.
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Five thousand miles away, Arlene Foster was asleep when Spotlight went out. Two days into an exhausting trip to deepen links with China, the First Minister and her team were pleased with how things were going.
That day she had held talks in Shanghai with Chinese Vice Premier Madam Liu Yangdong, the most powerful woman in the Chinese state, as well as having taken part in a series of meetings with Communist Party officials and businesses.
Unusually, the First Minister was the only politician on the trip. Two days before they were due to travel, Stormont Castle announced that Martin McGuinness was pulling out of the trip ‘due to unforeseen personal circumstances’, an allusion to the illness which within four months would take his life.
The deputy First Minister’s place was taken by McKibbin, and a small group including Foster’s private secretary, her spad Richard Bullick, a Stormont press officer and a photographer travelled with her.
Foster was enjoying the trip. She was at the height of her powers – almost a year into office as First Minister, on the back of a remarkable DUP election victory and jointly at the helm of what was then the most united Stormont Executive since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
She had a packed diary, with the windows for reflection or consultation with party colleagues back in Belfast largely limited to long periods of travel between three Chinese cities.
As the trip wore on, Foster and Bullick would be seen deep in conversation away from the others, but they kept up appearances and the trip went on as though nothing was amiss.
Although the DUP knew that the programme was coming and had carefully prepared written responses to Spotlight’s questions in advance of leaving Northern Ireland, Bullick did not see the broadcast.
The following morning at breakfast – just a couple of hours after the programme had gone out in Northern Ireland – one of Foster’s departmental press officers, Leona Edgar, approached the only journalist on the trip, UTV’s deputy political editor Tracey Magee, to ask her if she intended to question the First Minister about Spotlight.
The journalist asked if there had been much new material in the programme and Edgar said that she did not believe so – a not unreasonable response, given that much of the meat of the programme had already been published.
The issue was dropped until later that day when UTV’s newsdesk rang Magee, who by then was in Shenyang. ‘You’ve got to get her,’ they told her. ‘But there’s nothing new,’ Magee protested. ‘I know, but the shit has hit the fan here and we have to get her,’ came the response.
Unusually for a foreign trip, Magee and her cameraman were embedded with Foster’s party, in part due to Chinese sensitivities about filming by a Western television crew. But in travelling from Shenyang to Beijing, the UTV team became separated from the others, arriving late at night at the Chinese government-approved hotel in central Beijing where Foster was staying.
Foster and Bullick – in contact with colleagues in Belfast, but focussed on that day’s meetings – mulled over whether to agree to the interview. Having declined to do a detailed sit-down interview for Spotlight, Foster knew that at some point she was going to have to address the allegations. Declining a second interview would not look good.
By the time the journalists arrived at the five-star China World Hotel, which boasts that it offers ‘a grandeur worthy of royalty’, the interview had been approved. But time was running out. UTV’s main 6pm news was looming and getting film back to Belfast was not straightforward due to China’s internet firewall.
As soon as the UTV team arrived at the hotel, they abandoned their luggage and took Foster to a vacant area in front of the entrance. About 1am Foster, wrapped up against the winter cold of the Chinese capital
, stood in a vacant piece of land amid the skyscrapers which dominate the skyline of the Chinese capital’s central business district. She faced four questions about her RHI role.
Outside the glare of the television lighting, most of the others present on the trip stood in the dimly lit open space, observing the First Minister’s first public reaction to what had erupted at home. Dressed all in black, Foster was a confident interviewee. But at the end of the brief interview, her answer to one obvious question would come to encapsulate how the public viewed her response to the scandal.
Magee asked: ‘Do you regret how you handled the matter? Could you have done more?’
Unperturbed, Foster said that she had spoken to her former permanent secretary that day and he had told her that while she was minister he did not understand the problems with RHI ‘and therefore wasn’t in a position to advise me of the difficulties of [sic] the scheme’. Then she added: ‘So there really isn’t anything more, with hindsight, that I could have done, given the advice that was given to me at the time.’
Foster still gave no signs of being tense or alarmed by what was going on. But the following day, the final day of the trip, the full scale of the crisis back at home began to dawn on some of those in the travelling party.
The group had some free time, and that afternoon Magee tuned in to The Nolan Show where the whistleblower was speaking publicly for the first time. Foster was not listening to the broadcast – but Bullick was. Both he and Magee grasped the significance of what was now unfolding. Some of the civil servants could also comprehend that RHI was moving from a financial crisis to a political crisis.
Foster was in the immediate line of fire and it was impossible to fight back against Janette O’Hagan, the woman whose warnings should have prevented the scandal. Still speaking anonymously, the businesswoman told Nolan how she had simply gone online to check the RHI tariffs and told him: ‘I swear it took me five minutes to realise it was set up wrong, Stephen, when I compared it with the UK one. So all these people saying they didn’t know … it took just five minutes of a normal person looking online to realise that it wasn’t right and there was [sic] opportunities for fraud there.’