by Sam McBride
By contrast, Bell was closer to Robinson than any other DUP MLA and was reverential towards him. Bell employed Robinson’s son, Jonathan, as his constituency office manager and Robinson’s daughter-in-law as his part-time secretary. At a time when, as DUP leader Robinson felt under internal threat, he rewarded his friend’s loyalty, promoting him to junior minister in 2011 and then a full Stormont minister in 2015 – a decision which inadvertently led to Bell taking responsibility for RHI at the point where it was about to fall apart. There were also sensitive personal circumstances which meant that Bell had a unique bond with the Robinsons, which went beyond simple transactional politics.
One Stormont source who observed the DUP at the closest of quarters over more than a decade said: ‘Peter could ask Johnny to murder someone and he’d do it.’ That metaphor could not have been used for many of the others around Robinson. He had always been feared and respected within the DUP rather than loved.
Robinson did not have many close friends and was wary of several senior colleagues whose loyalty he suspected. But Bell’s devotion to the DUP leader was such that while still a minister – and around the time that RHI was falling apart – he began work on a PhD about his party leader and told colleagues that Robinson had agreed to turn over some of his personal papers to him for the academic study.
Although Robinson had stood down as DUP leader by 2016, given Bell’s closeness to Robinson, his contact with Paisley – who was from a rival internal faction – stands out.
The picture is further complicated by comments Cleland and Bell made to the BBC journalists as they discussed the story in that period. Both men gave the impression that they were concerned about Foster’s leadership, seeing it as an attempt to liberalise the party and move it away from its religious roots.
If that was a significant motive for what Bell did, it does not sit easily with the idea that Robinson was in any way orchestrating what was going on. Robinson was the man who had spent years gradually modernising and moderating the DUP. He had a vision of the party replacing the Ulster Unionist Party as the dominant party of unionism, and knew that to do so meant reaching beyond the narrow world of Protestant evangelicalism.
When contacted for this book, Robinson was reluctant to explain why he had discussed with Bell whether to go to The Times or Nolan and whether he was encouraging him to speak out as he did.
Instead, he responded – along with other DUP figures to whom separate questions were asked – with a solicitor’s letter which claimed that what had been put to him was ‘replete with inaccuracies and defamatory content’. The letter did not specify anything which was actually inaccurate but threatened that ‘in the event that publication of inaccurate and defamatory material occurs our clients are fully prepared to issue appropriate legal proceedings’. Further attempts to secure answers to the questions drew no response.
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After the BBC Spotlight exposé on 6 December, the foundations of the Stormont Executive – which with the DUP and Sinn Féin jointly at the helm had ruled Northern Ireland for almost a decade – were rocking. By the time the Bell interview went out, they were crumbling. A massive audience had watched the extraordinary programme. When it was broadcast on BBC One NI, 56% of everyone watching TV in Northern Ireland at the time was tuned in. The average for that 10.40pm slot was for BBC One to have 18% of all viewers. The following day, the Sinn Féin deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness phoned Foster to ask her to step aside as First Minister while an investigation took place into the allegations. She instinctively refused, and from that point devolved government in Northern Ireland was on a path to implosion. But to understand why the revelations of December 2016 shook Northern Ireland, we have to go back in time.
CHAPTER 2
IN THE BEGINNING
Fiona Hepper, who had nothing to contribute as an energy specialist, arrived in June 2010 to head up the team of Stormont civil servants responsible for energy policy. In a textbook move for the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Hepper was a ‘generalist’ who shifted from department to department, learning on the job, before climbing the career ladder in an entirely different area.
The psychology graduate began life in the civil service as a statistician, and over a 30-year career had worked on everything from cross-border economic cooperation to labour market policy, communications, telecoms and emergency planning.
This was how Northern Ireland had been ruled from its creation in 1921. While the ministers in charge of departments had shifted from the Official Unionist Party during the first half-century of the fledgling state’s existence, to direct rule ministers flying in and out from London, to power-sharing ministers appointed after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, there had been one constant: the Northern Ireland Civil Service.
The energy team, which Hepper now headed, sat within the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), a relatively small department of about 600 officials but with sprawling responsibilities for tourism, company law, economic development, consumer protection, health and safety law, cross-border trade and telecoms. When Hepper arrived in her new post, she had four hours with her predecessor to be briefed on the new role and was given a bundle of documentation. It was a huge job. Energy policy was in flux. There was a push for renewable energy systems, about which there was limited understanding, alongside proposals to extend the piped natural gas network in Northern Ireland and moves to harmonise the electricity markets between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. On top of that, DETI’s small energy team found itself responsible for transposing EU energy directives into law – a responsibility the devolved Scottish or Welsh administrations did not have to do because energy policy was only devolved in Northern Ireland.
Not long into the post, Hepper decided to create a renewable heat branch within the wider division. But while that might have implied that there was now a significant team working on the issue, it was the equivalent of one and a half full-time staff, with the official in charge of the branch working part time. But no one at the time viewed this as a Father Ted approach to public administration – it was just how things had always been done in Stormont.
Although Northern Ireland had a huge public sector compared to anywhere else in the UK, the reality was that a region of 1.8 million people was always going to be doing things on a shoestring by comparison to Whitehall, the throbbing administrative centre of the British State from which an empire had once been administered and wars directed. But despite Stormont’s small size, there was a culture of civil servants doing whatever it took to please their ministers and a reluctance to hand back power to Westminster.
By the time Hepper arrived at DETI, it had for some time been under pressure to set up a Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) as part of an EU-wide endeavour to financially induce businesses to move from fossil fuel heating systems to sustainable green alternatives. There were two main reasons: an EU directive had set challenging targets for renewable heat. If those were not met by 2020, there would be huge fines from Brussels. The second imperative to launch RHI came from business. The rest of the UK had been moving ahead with a scheme that would launch in late 2011. Without that subsidy being extended by Stormont, Northern Ireland firms would be at a competitive disadvantage. In the aftermath of a major recession, that was a potent argument in favour of action.
The Whitehall department responsible for the GB heat subsidy had in 2008 offered Stormont the chance to piggyback on its scheme, something which would have meant Stormont agreeing for Westminster to legislate for it. Hepper’s predecessor, in consultation with Arlene Foster, the DUP minister who would spend seven years in the department, decided not to avail of that opportunity. They believed that Westminster was rushing unnecessarily and were aware of a wider political concern in Northern Ireland, which at that point was just a year into the restoration of devolved government. The unionists and nationalists who made up the Stormont Executive were agreed that the whole point of devolution was to allow t
hem to decide their own policies. In that context, simply handing back power to Westminster was counterintuitive.
Regardless of that benign logic, which might explain what happened in 2008, from this moment of divergence suspicion would subsequently arise as to why a handful of civil servants and politicians in Belfast had decided to do their own thing and whether someone somewhere in Stormont had spied an opportunity to exploit a funding stream from London.
Civil servants and politicians often consciously chose not to record controversial information, which makes it difficult to be certain what happened in the early years of the scheme. And the fact that the department had a deliberate policy of not recording important information means that if there was any inappropriate decision to deliberately exploit the RHI funding it would almost certainly not be recorded.
After deciding to run its own subsidy for renewable heat, Stormont then took its time about deciding what that should be. Staffing shortages contributed to it taking a year for DETI to hire – largely with EU money – consultants AECOM Pöyry to produce a report on the local potential for renewable heat.
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 difficul
ties 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, with it clear that none of those designing the policy were experts, the department acted as it invariably did in these situations – it turned to private consultants. Hepper and her boss authorised a contract that would ultimately see £100,000 paid to Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA) for recommendations about incentivising renewable heat. If the RHI scandal resulted from a series of genuine mistakes from the outset, rather than a calculated attempt to fleece money from the Treasury, then that decision was critical to all that followed.
