DUP minister Diane Dodds won’t say if she can force repayment of millions wrongly paid out in Covid cash

Last week it emerged that grants of £10,000 to compensate for the impact of the lockdown had been paid by the Department for the Economy to owners of wind turbines and into Sinn Féin bank accounts - despite neither being eligible for the funds.

The grants were paid automatically, without individuals even applying for it, using bank details held by Stormont for those who pay business rates by direct debit.

Last week Sinn Féin hurriedly returned the money – which had been paid for constituency offices owned by the party – just as it was about to be exposed by The Nolan Show and as public anger grew the issue eventually led to senator Elisha McCallion and MLA Catherine Kelly resigning.

Yesterday Economy Minister Diane Dodds was repeatedly asked in the Assembly chamber to set out the powers which would allow her to recoup the funds. On each occasion, she avoided the central part of the question.

Mrs Dodds robustly defended her department’s actions in rushing out the money, arguing that tens of thousands of businesses had received the payments and many of them would not have survived without such urgent action.

She said it was not possible to put in place the usual checks and balances for government payments and that she had received written support for her approach from every Executive party.

Mrs Dodds said that less than 2% of more than 24,000 payments had been erroneous – more than 400 wrong payments, of which 74 have been recovered in full.

She insisted that her department would attempt to recoup all of the money and would write to everyone ineligible for payment “asking” them to repay the money.

When asked by UUP MLA John Stewart what legal powers she had to claw back the money, Mrs Dodds did not answer the question.

SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan then asked if she had power to recover the money. Mrs Dodds replied by saying that if someone applied to the scheme outside its parameters then that would be wrong and the department would seek to recover the money.

However, that only refers to those who applied for funds – not those to whom payments were made automatically.

When asked about Sinn Féin’s actions in holding on to the money for months before repaying it, she said that anyone who wrongly received the grant “should have returned that money and should not have been tardy in doing so”.

To heckling from unionists, Sinn Féin MLA Caoimhe Archibald said that “oversight of public spending and public money is something we all must take very seriously and is something my party is obviously very aware of since learning of erroneous payments to our offices last week and there is a need to ensure that money is returned to the public purse”.

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