by Sam McBride
put the benign interpretation on it, which was [that] whoever the author was of this resistance or reluctance [was] feeling that officials were being too cautious and were at risk of hobbling a good scheme before it was necessary to do so. As the resistance went on, I found it – and still find it – more and more difficult to have such a benign interpretation of it. But I don’t know what the actual reason was for it.
Crawford was clear to the inquiry that he was not pushing to delay the scheme being brought under control: ‘I certainly never indicated to Timothy Cairns that he should seek as late a date as possible for the introduction of cost controls.’
McCormick said that documentation revealed by the inquiry ‘would suggest that Andrew Crawford was aware of the perverse incentive within the scheme and the excessive use of heat, and of the forthcoming “massive spike” in applications’ and had ‘detailed knowledge and understanding of the problems with the scheme from the summer of 2015 onwards.’ He said that when a year and a half later he publicly named Crawford as the individual believed to have been attempting to delay tiering, he received a phone call from Cairns. He said that Cairns had told him that Crawford had not been the only influence in this period and that DUP MLA William Irwin had also wanted to keep the high tariffs available for longer. He said that Cairns also told him that there was some substance to Bell’s allegation about Timothy Johnston having a role in the delay.
At the inquiry, Cairns said that his reference to Irwin had been ‘flippant’ and along the lines of ‘for goodness sake, William Irwin phoned me once on behalf of a constituent – how many DUP people do you want me to name, Andrew?’ As a huge dairy farmer and chairman of Stormont’s agriculture committee, there was some logic to Irwin receiving queries about RHI, whether from the UFU or individual farmers. But the reference to Johnston was more significant and consistent with what Cairns would later say publicly – that Johnston had ‘started the process’ that delayed an end to cash for ash. Cairns told the inquiry that during summer 2015 he had on ‘at least 10 occasions in meetings and private conversations’ attempted to get Stewart and other officials to investigate allegations of RHI abuse which he was receiving. Stewart said that was an exaggeration. However, he accepted that on perhaps two occasions Cairns had raised concerns about possible fraud. Those concerns, he said, ‘were clearly serious and needed to be looked into but [were] not in any way specific and not in any way containing any specific information that could be followed up’.
Trevor Cooper, DETI’s finance director, said that Claire Hughes, an independent member of the departmental board and a member of the board’s audit committee, had told him ‘at some point in the autumn of 2015’ that she was a claimant under the less lucrative domestic RHI. He said that he recalled her telling him that the installer ‘mentioned to her that people may generate heat excessively under the non-domestic scheme’ and he believed that ‘the poultry sector was mentioned’. Cooper said he reported it to his boss, Eugene Rooney, who asked if the independent board member would put it on the record – which Cooper said she would not.
Hughes, a former bank manager who by this time was working as a professional matchmaker, told the inquiry that she had an air source heat pump installed in her new home in 2008. But it had failed two years later during the big freeze of 2010 and she had replaced it with a new heat pump in February 2011 – it was now eligible for RHI. Hughes told the inquiry that the installer was at her home in January or February 2015 to service the pump. She said that he told her at that point that the scheme was open to abuse and ‘there were reports of farmers heating empty sheds and churches being heated when no one was in them’. She said she mentioned that to Cooper and other board members on 5 June 2015 but denied that she had ever been asked to put it on the record.
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By late August, civil servants’ misinterpretation of another development contributed to a reduction in their sense of urgency. DETI believed that it had suddenly been given extra money by the Treasury. A spreadsheet of its budgets was updated by Stormont’s Department of Finance to reflect DETI’s forecast for expenditure. However, this administrative update was misinterpreted as a sign that the funding was unlimited after all and they just had to ask for more money. As late as 7 October, that belief persisted. In an email to Crawford that day, Mills clearly viewed the fact – as he believed – that London was paying as significant. He told the Finance Minister’s spad that DETI was ‘still fighting with your officials on the funding; they will end up forcing closure of the scheme (and it’s not even DEL [Stormont’s budget]) at this rate’.
The fact that the pot of money for the scheme might have been virtually bottomless ought to have been irrelevant. By now it was known to officials that RHI was seriously flawed. They had received multiple reports of abuse or suspicious behaviour and knew that huge sums were going to individual claimants. They also knew that there may be a conflict with EU state aid law – because the scheme was so wildly generous that it was now an illegal form of state subsidy. Yet their primary concern appears to have been over which pot of taxpayers’ money the scheme was funded. As long as DETI itself was not having to pick up the bill, officials appear to have been far less exercised about the fact that public money was being spent in a way that was at best questionable.
But even amid this confusion, Bernie Brankin in DETI’s finance division emailed McCormick on 24 August to warn that ‘RHI AME is not standard AME. DECC has confirmed that penalties are applied for overspending’. Therefore, even based on the questionable logic that if DETI was not paying for the scheme it was less important to fix it, there was evidence that ought to have caused alarm. Perhaps that reminder from Brankin caused a jolt of fear for those at the top of DETI. The day she sent that message to McCormick, the summer of indecision came to a climax in Netherleigh House. As the civil service and political leadership of the department gathered for a lunchtime meeting of DETI’s senior management team, discussion began about RHI.
By this stage Bell had hardly been in the department for a month and a half and he was now late for the meeting. As they waited for the minister, Cairns said that he threw out, as a last half-hearted attempt to secure what he believed his party wanted, a question as to whether 1 October was the latest possible date they could accept. Cairns said that he did so in the expectation that officials would say ‘yes’. His motivation, he said, was that it was a defence in case anyone inside the party questioned whether he really had done everything to delay the changes as long as possible. That meant that if a boiler installed complained or if ‘Moy Park comes ranting and raving to the party’, the DUP could say that it had done everything possible to delay the changes, he said. To the shock of Cairns and McCormick, Mills made ‘a strange noise’ of contemplation and then after several seconds volunteered a later date. What others at the meeting did not realise was that just that morning Wightman and Hughes had been discussing that it was now going to be difficult to bring in the changes by 1 October and early November was more realistic.
In the formal meeting, Cairns said that Bell expressed no particular view on what was being discussed but turned to him and asked whether others would be happy with the decision – a reference Cairns took to mean Crawford and Johnston. Coghlin said: ‘You get the impression that the minister simply sat there while this debate went on until somebody said “right, that’s it”’. Over coming days, Cairns communicated the outcome to Johnston and Crawford. He said that Crawford seemed satisfied. Three days after the decision had been taken, phone records show that Cairns phoned Crawford multiple times with one of the calls lasting more than half an hour.
Yet again, minutes of the crucial meeting had not been taken. The closest thing to a contemporaneous record was an email from Mills three days later in which he told McCormick that after a discussion with the minister ‘we have revised the position to reflect an implementation date of early November (probably not before the 3rd)’. Even at this stage, formal approval only c
ame – in signatures from Bell and Cairns – nine days after the meeting where the real decision was taken. It had taken eight weeks for Bell to sign what had been presented to him as an ‘urgent’ need for a decision about a scheme he had been told was over budget. And when the decision finally was taken, it was to delay the changes he had been told were necessary.
Bell said that he had been given insufficient information with which to grasp the urgency of what was before him. Over his weeks of holiday, he said that neither officials nor his spad had attempted to contact him – which they accepted. Cairns said that part of the reluctance in contacting Bell was that he had left instructions for no meetings when he was away in the first three weeks of August. But the spad admitted that he and McCormick ‘should have jumped in the ministerial car and gone up [to Bell’s “summer house”]’ or phoned the minister. Stewart’s sense was that the submission had not reached the minister during the entire summer period until the meeting in late August, although Mills believed that it had gone to Bell much earlier. Cairns said that officials had not been candid with him about their concerns about what he was up to. He said:
I wish they’d come to me and said, ‘What are ya playing at?’ I mean, on the one hand … Mr Stewart says, ‘Oh, we’d a great rapport, a great working relationship over many years’, but yet he didn’t feel he could come and say, ‘I think you’re resisting here in a wholly inappropriate way’. I mean, I would’ve been very receptive to Mr Stewart saying that.
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According to Cairns and others, the way summer 2015 unfolded in DETI was only possible because of Bell’s remarkable indifference to much of what went on within his department. There is considerable evidence that senior officials almost viewed Cairns as the de facto minister. If they could convince him, then the minister would fall into line with most proposals – and not just on RHI. Bell was a complex, and at times contradictory, character who arguably should never have been elevated to running a Stormont department. Cairns described Bell as ‘pretty passive in meetings’ and someone who regularly did not bother to fully read his submissions. That, Cairns said, meant that during the weeks when Bell was on holiday he was reluctant to send the 8 July submission to him in the ministerial car – as he said he would have done with another minister – because he believed that Bell would simply have signed the submission without reading it. Instead, he felt that Bell needed to be verbally briefed to satisfy himself that he understood the significance of what he was doing. Bell was contemptuous of that claim, saying that he read submissions ‘from cover to cover’. The former social worker said: ‘When I got a submission, I read the submissions. I often read them into the early hours of the morning, and my wife … can attest to that.’ But Bell’s former private secretary, Sean Kerr, lent credence to the claim that was not the case. Kerr said that he was often present when Bell read submissions in the ministerial car and ‘I formed the impression that he would read those documents in a summary fashion and rely on the special advisor’s guidance … on several occasions the minister remarked directly to me that he had not read all the detail of the submission or annex, but was guided by the special advisor’s comments’.
Bell said that his relationship with Cairns, was ‘generally good’. He said that
Timothy and his wife had hosted us for meals in their family home and socially in Belfast and he had been supportive to me at times of family bereavement … while information to the contrary has been given to the inquiry I recall that Timothy frequently expressed support for me to me and on one occasion during this period stated he believed in me as a politician.
Cairns said that those claims of close contact were wildly exaggerated and that after the June 2015 breakfast row in London his relationship with Bell had been strictly professional. Bell said, however, that Cairns on ‘many occasions … spoke over me in ministerial meetings, contradicted me and … on one occasion told me he would tell me what to do.’ He said:
My perspective is that Timothy saw himself as working for the other spads as opposed to the minister and felt intimidated by them. An example of this was when he confided in me that Timothy Johnston had told him to get out and canvass for Gavin Robinson – then running for MP in East Belfast – while he was a spad or he wouldn’t have a job as spad in the morning.
Cairns was scathing about the man who had been his boss:
Jonathan usually presented a confident manner. During these periods our relationship was good. At other times Jonathan would be emotional, quoting the Bible and wondering about the eternal destiny of his soul. Again, during these periods our relationship was good. Jonathan also exhibited an explosive personality, particularly when he was told that something he wanted may not/would not be possible. During these periods our relationship was strained.
Cairns said that in their early weeks in DETI prior to the London row Bell was ‘on a significant high’, and often described him as ‘top spad’.
On his return to the department, Cairns said that there had been no disagreements between himself and Bell during July and August – although Bell was rarely around in that period. But in November, just as RHI was finally being rectified, Bell and his spad clashed again. Cairns said that Bell ‘was concerned that the press office was not delivering enough press coverage’ and ‘he wanted the press office dismissed’. The press officers were civil servants, and so Cairns and McCormick told him that would not be possible. Cairns said that Bell ‘was angry at being told he could not employ a private PR firm to undertake press engagement’ and then was ‘angry’ that his invitation to the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award had been sent to Foster in error.
However, Cairns said that Bell ‘did prepare with great diligence’ before his public Assembly appearances. Nevertheless, even after such preparation there were hints of problems with Bell when he appeared in the Assembly, and his public bungling there was one of the reasons why many DUP MLAs were wary of him.
In February 2016, he was challenged during Assembly questions to ‘come off the fence’ about Brexit. Bell emphatically told a surprised chamber on several occasions that the referendum question had not yet been set, and used that as his reason for not stating whether he supported Brexit. Bell went on to admonish the questioner, Jim Allister QC, that ‘as I stand here today, we do not know what the referendum question is’. Allister interjected to correct him, saying: ‘we do’, but the minister was insistent:
We do not know … we have not been given the terms of the referendum question. Will it simply ask whether we wish to leave the EU? In that case, I imagine that the member will say yes. However, if the question is whether we wish to remain in the EU, I imagine that the answer from the member will be no. In the absence of knowing the exact nature of the question, it is a very, very foolish person who answers it.
Allister, one of Stormont’s sharpest intellects, asked the Speaker whether it was right for Bell to ‘mislead the house’ and highlighted that the previous month Bell had misled the Assembly about unemployment rates. The Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader informed the chamber that the question was set in Section 1 of the European Union Referendum Act 2015. But, even as his DUP colleagues cringed at the obvious gaffe, Bell was unabashed, saying: ‘I was referring to the wider question of what the exact implications of a UK exit will be. We will not know what those implications are until David Cameron’s negotiations regarding the UK’s position within the EU have concluded.’
The evidence of Johnston, who as the key spad to Robinson had the ear of the First Minister perhaps like no one else in Stormont, is particularly intriguing. Johnston said that Bell’s
approach to reading, questioning, and engagement was known to me to be very poor during his time as a junior minister in Stormont Castle. I have no first hand knowledge of his work pattern when he moved to DETI but I suspect it did not change … Sammy Wilson as Finance Minister did tell me on one occasion that when he met Mr Bell as part of a monitoring round bi-lateral meeting
he was appalled at his lack of preparation.
Johnston said that he had advised Robinson that Bell was ‘not a suitable candidate’ to replace Foster at DETI and he believed that Richard Bullick, Robinson’s other key spad, ‘shared my assessment’.
Why then had Robinson gone against the advice of his two trusted lieutenants? He seems to have been influenced by a need for loyalty among his ministers and the fact that Bell also employed some of his family may have endeared him to Robinson. For his part, Robinson told the inquiry that part of the reason was a desire to limit the scale of the reshuffle. He admitted that Bell ‘was not the most popular member in the DUP’s team and might have been seen as an acquired taste’, but that he had ‘suitable academic qualifications and worthwhile life-experience in his professional career’, as well as experience as a junior minister. But while that was going on within the DUP, publicly the party had lauded Bell. While urging people to elect Bell as an MP just weeks before he became DETI minister, DUP MLA Christopher Stalford had gushingly said: ‘I’ve been about politics a long time … and can honestly say I’ve very rarely met anyone better with people than Jonny Bell … a good egg … just a big Christian gent.’
However, even though there was enmity between Bell and Cairns, they have consistently agreed that when Cairns worked to delay RHI being dealt with, he had been acting on the instructions of others. Bell said: ‘I don’t regard Timothy Cairns as having any interest in keeping the tariffs high and it was the pressure exerted on him by the other spads … that led to the more serious detrimental consequences.’ Without Bell, the inquiry would never have been established. It was his demand for a judge-led public inquiry which made it difficult for the DUP and Sinn Féin to present a lesser investigation as adequate. The inquiry proved some of what he alleged in his explosive interview with Stephen Nolan – most notably that at least one DUP figure outside his department had played an unseen role in delaying an end to cash for ash. But the inquiry also presented an unflattering image of a lightweight minister who was keen to get the credit for popular decisions but lacked either the interest or the ability to comprehend crucial issues.
