Arlene Foster’s pledge cast aside, angry RHI claimants plan fresh court challenge to being thrown out of scheme

Late on Thursday one of Mrs Foster’s closest political allies within the DUP, Diane Dodds, published 142 pages of documentation setting out her plan to shut the scheme – which closed to new entrants in 2016 – for good.

If the plan is approved by MLAs, the most common 99kw boilers will get £35,000 as a lump sum – taxable at 19% or 40% for most claimants – rather than annual payments which for the final entrants were meant to go on until 2036.

Originally, those payments were as much as £55,000 a year for those running a boiler almost every minute of the year – although few reached that ultra-high level of use.

The maximum subsidy has already been slashed 96% to a level which the Department for the Economy’s own hand-picked expert said was causing economic hardship for legitimate businesses.

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Mrs Dodds pledged to be “fair both to those participants who joined the scheme legitimately and acted in good faith and to the taxpayers who fund it”. But in a public consultation her department set out its clear preference for closing the scheme down at a cost of about £68 million.

That would require legislation to be passed by the Assembly. Once ratified, the decision is almost certain to head straight to the courts – joining a series of other legal challenges by participants which have been delayed by legal wrangling and the slowness of the justice system.

One claimant told the News Letter there was fury at what had happened and that “this has become about much more than money and has become about injustice”.

Andrew Trimble, who represents many of the boiler owners, said: “It would appear that, to protect the agri-food, hospitality and third sector economies and the public interest from the Department for the Economy, that we must invite the courts to resolve this governance mess.”

The decision impacts claimants who between them have more than 1,900 biomass boilers still on scheme – as well as a handful of installations of other technologies such as heat pumps which previously have not been touched.

The department is clear that if it gets to shut RHI it will then attempt to open a new type of RHI – something which vast poultry processor Moy Park has been keen to see ever since the scheme shut to new entrants because its Northern Irish operation is now at a disadvantage to rivals in GB.

That scheme is likely to involve up-front lump sums because few people would trust the department to keep paying them annually after how it has handled this scheme.

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