Civil servant Fiona Hepper, who was promoted after RHI, misled Foster, inquiry finds

Ms Hepper, who was Head of Energy under Arlene Foster, is now one of the most senior officials in the Department of Education, responsible for Northern Ireland’s schools system.

The inquiry found that on several occasions she had been involved in misleading documentation going to Mrs Foster.

Sir Patrick Coghlin found it was unlikely that Ms Hepper had told Mrs Foster that the scheme was not being wholly funded by the Treasury prior to its launch, something the inquiry said was “of very considerable importance”.

The inquiry also found a series of other failures by Ms Hepper, her deputy Joanne McCutcheon and her subordinate Peter Hutchinson.

Sir Patrick said that one of Ms Hepper and Mr Hutchinson’s assertions to Mrs Foster – that a Northern Ireland RHI would produce the most heat at the best value – was “a serious omission likely to mislead any reader”.

The inquiry rejected Ms Hepper’s claim that several months before RHI was launched she had verbally warned Arlene Foster in explicit terms that the department had been told by Ofgem that RHI was vulnerable from the outset because it was being launched without cost controls.

The report said: “If the conversation between Ms Hepper and the minister did take place, the inquiry finds that the warning was not highlighted as Ms Hepper maintained.

“It is the view of the inquiry that if such a warning were being raised with the minister it should have been the subject of a careful minute or record setting out the advice that Ms Hepper had provided to the minister and the minister’s response thereto.”

Sir Patrick said that the Assembly committee which scrutinised DETI “was not provided with sufficient/adequate information to permit [it] to effectively discharge its scrutiny function”.

The inquiry said that DETI allocated “inadequate” resources to the creation of RHI and that it should never have embarked on the scheme, given its complexity and the department’s lack of resources.

It said that once the scheme was up and running the decision to allow almost all of those with any responsibility for RHI to leave DETI within the space of a few months from about a year after the scheme was established “should not have been allowed to happen....the level of turnover should have been escalated to top management within DETI and failure to do so clearly suggested a lack of leadership.”

It added: “The inquiry found it difficult to understand how this significant changeover of senior and junior staff was permitted to occur....”