RHI audit report
Inquiry recommendations meet resistance
24 October 2024
RHI Inquiry report.
The dysfunctionality and incompetence of the Stormont administration is well documented. Responsibility for this is most often attributed to local political parties. And whilst this is true it would be wrong to think that politicians are solely to blame. In nearly every scandal that has erupted in Stormont over the period of devolution, civil servants have been deeply complicit.
The most notable example of this is the Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI). This scheme, set up in 2012, incentivised businesses and farmers to switch to the eco-friendly boilers by paying them a subsidy for the wood pellet fuel needed to run them. However, mistakes in its design meant that the subsidy payment was set higher than the cost of the fuel. This created an incentive for applicants to use boilers not to conserve energy but to generate income. With no financial safeguards in place the RHI scheme had the potential to put Stormont on the hook for an additional half a billion pounds in spending. The workings of this scheme, and the outrageous greed associated with it, was made public in 2016. Escalating into what became known as the “Cash for Ash” scandal it led directly to the collapse of the Stormont Executive in January 2017.
A public inquiry into the running of the RHI scheme, chaired by retired judge Sir Patrick Coghlin, was set up in 2017. With Stormont facing an overspend bill of hundreds of millions of pounds, cost-control steps were taken in 2019. The report of the inquiry was published in 2020. It identified a multiplicity of mistakes in the running of the RHI scheme and made a number of recommendations on how the Stormont administration could better manage these types of projects. One of stipulations from the inquiry panel was that progress on the implementation of its recommendations should be subject to regular assessment by the NI Audit Office.
The latest report from the Audit Office, published earlier this month, more than four years on from the RHI Inquiry, has concluded Stormont will likely never implement some of its key recommendations. It found that, up to this point, just 26 of Coghlin’s 42 recommendations had been adopted. Auditors also found that in one of the most basic areas which contributed to the ‘Cash for Ash’ scandal – poor record-keeping - the performance of civil servants had actually got worse. Civil servants couldn’t even maintain good records when responding to the Audit Office itself, even though the document they were being asked to explain had only been published a month earlier. This caused the publication of the latest Audit Office report to be delayed by three months.
Of the sixteen (almost 40%) recommendations not yet implemented 11 have not been advanced at all. One of these relates to a requirement that any minister bringing a bill to Stormont should actually have read the legislation before asking MLAs to pass it into law. While action plans have been drawn up for the remaining five recommendations there is no confidence that they will ever be implemented. The Executive hasn’t even bothered to recreate the subgroup of ministers meant to be overseeing implementation of the RHI Inquiry report.
However, this is not just about ministers it is also about senior civil servants. The current head of the Civil Service, Jayne Brady, was brought in as an outsider to reform the Civil Service after RHI. In 2021, she said addressing those issues raised by the Inquiry would be one of her “key areas for delivery” and that implementation of its recommendations would be "within this calendar year". This did not happen. When challenged over this by journalists, her office passed the questions to the Department of Finance. It claimed that “considerable work has been done” and blamed problems on “a global pandemic, absence of functioning institutions and extreme budget pressures”. This is completely at odds with the Audit Office which found that even if given more time, Stormont would not adopt the recommendations because departments don’t believe they need to do what the auditors believe is necessary.
The culture that produced the RHI scandal has continued with reforms either being resisted or, if adopted in theory, being ignored in practice. This came out clearly at the Covid Inquiry sessions that took place in Belfast earlier in the year. For instance, the new Code of Conduct for Special Advisers states that records should be maintained within official systems, yet these ‘spads’ – alongside ministers and senior civil servants – were regularly using other systems such as WhatsApp to communicate key information. This wasn't saved into the official record and when devices were retrieved it was found that they had been wiped. All of this is indicative of the impunity and lack of accountability at the heart of the Stormont system. At times this can be commercial but at other times, such as during the pandemic, it can have very serious consequences.
The saga of RHI still hasn’t ended. Despite the commitment to wind up the scheme an alternative has still not been put in place. From projections of a massive overspend Stormont is now only using a fraction of the finance available from the British Treasury to promote eco-friendly forms of heating. Tens of millions of pounds are being returned to London every year. It is also reported that many owners of RHI boilers have switched back to fossil fuel heating systems.
One of the most outrageous stories to appear recently is that former DUP leader Arlene Foster, the person most closely associated with the RHI debacle, has been advertising herself as a renewable energy expert at a cost of more than £10,000 a day. This is farcical but it demonstrates that there is no downside for the people within Stormont whatever the scale of incompetence. The only sanction over RHI was the issuing of a warning to just one civil servant.
The general lesson to be drawn from all of this is that Stormont is both incapable of reforming itself or of being a vehicle for reforms.