Sam McBride: Fairness to RHI claimants matters not just to them, but is a test of Stormont

But forgetting about RHI will not solve the problems which continue to fester in a scheme which will not be shut until 2036.

This week saw the publication of credible evidence that there are more detrimental repercussions from how Stormont has mishandled the scheme – and evidence that it continues to be mishandled.

When RHI ran out of control 2015 and it became clear that the Executive was going to have to share the cost of a scheme it believed was being funded from London, there was panic.

In late 2016 that panic became political. Amid myriad allegations against the DUP and evidence that huge sums were being paid to many claimants, the then DUP minister Simon Hamilton rushed through temporary cuts to the subsidy.

Those January 2017 regulations were immediately taken to court by boiler owners. In autumn 2017 they lost their challenge in the High Court and, more than two years later, their appeal has still not been heard.

In the meantime and during the three-year governance vacuum at Stormont, civil servants in the Department for the Economy (DfE) were left to find a long-term solution.

They decided on far deeper cuts than Mr Hamilton, eviscerating what had once been ‘cash for ash’ and making it far less generous than comparable schemes in GB and the Republic.

Unsurprisingly, few members of the public were outraged that what had once been an uncapped scheme paying a notional £56,000 a year to the few people running their boilers around the clock had been cut to a maximum of £13,000 by Mr Hamilton and now chopped down to £2,100 – a 96% drop.

But by this stage the stories of genuine claimants who had entered the scheme in good faith at the urging of Stormont had become too loud to be ignored entirely.

As the hapless Secretary of State Karen Bradley – who had agreed to rush Stormont civil servants’ changes to the scheme through Westminster – brought the proposals before Parliament, there were awkward questions from MPs and peers.

By then it was clear that this was not an attempt to address what had once been a huge overspend – instead, the cuts were so deep that they led to a massive underspend of the money available from the Treasury.

Officials insisted that their hands were tied by EU State Aid rules and anything more generous would be illegal under EU law. Yet they had no coherent explanation as to why schemes in other parts of Europe remain jaw-droppingly more lucrative than what they claim is the absolute maximum subsidy.

In a concession to the House of Lords, officials agreed that if Westminster would pass their cuts then they would bring in an independent figure to examine if their actions had unfairly left claimants in financial distress.

The man assigned that task was Andrew Buglass, an energy expert from England. For reasons which remain unclear, his report was only published on Wednesday – five months late.

Its 27 pages of findings will have made deeply uncomfortable reading for DfE’s energy division. Mr Buglass set out multiple examples of how their actions had led to individuals – who entered the scheme at Stormont’s urging – not only failing to receive any real incentive, but instead suffering significant hardship.

At the heart of the problem is that civil servants and – infamously – the then minister Arlene Foster had given cast iron guarantees that the subsidy rate was unalterable for 20 years.

On the back of those firmest of guarantees, huge loans were taken out to finance the installation of boilers. Many claimants remain deeply in debt – but suddenly found that the supposedly guaranteed income which would repay those loans had evaporated.

Mr Buglass found that one claimant had liquidated their pension fund to keep the bank from the door, another had sold a home, another had sold land, others had taken out overdrafts to keep up their repayments – and there has also been a significant impact on mental health.

He said he had been told of “knock-on effects in relationships and families, with recriminations among family members or heated disagreements on what action should be taken as a result” and one man said that “his children had faced bullying in school” as a result of him being a claimant.

The evidence which he has collated tallies with that which this newspaper has been reporting for two and a half years.

Unquestionably, some of those who entered the scheme were chancers and there is prima facie evidence that some were crooks.

But one of the striking things about Mr Buglass’s report is that it records – as I have heard from several claimants – that it is claimants themselves who are pressing for crooks to be found and prosecuted, something which DfE has been exceptionally slow to do.

Mr Buglass’s work is doubly embarrassing for DfE’s civil servants because not only does it show that their actions have led to hardship, but it also disproves one of their key claims last year.

At the time, DfE confidently said that those with RHI boilers would not revert to fossil fuels because wood pellets are the cheapest form of fuel and therefore it would not make sense.

But Mr Buglass’s report – consistent with what this newspaper has reported from claimants and other industry sources – found that contrary to civil servants’ claims, a significant percentage of RHI claimants to whom he spoke have either reverted to gas or are considering doing so, in many cases because they can bulk buy lpg gas through massive poultry processor Moy Park.

Read in context with everything else which we now know about RHI, Mr Buglass’s report suggests that the department which set up RHI and has repeatedly bungled the incentive since that point is still – to this day – unable to adequately run this scheme, despite putting huge civil service resources into putting it right.

The day before it released Mr Buglass’s report, DfE released another report which recommended a 38% increase in the main tariff.

That sounds like a lot, but a high percentage of a small figure is still a small figure. Even if DUP minister Diane Dodds agrees to that it would not address the scale of the hardship identified by Mr Buglass.

There are only about 1,000 RHI claimants and they are easy to ignore. Many of the public will instinctively feel that they were overcompensated at such a high level that they deserve little sympathy now.

That ignores the plight of those who entered the scheme because they were environmentalists or they believed Stormont’s promises, and ignores the fact that many of them were running their boilers at a low level. In fact, those who got in early and received vast sums will be fine – they will have in many cases made enough to pay off their loans. Those who claimed the least are now facing the harshest punishment.

But this doesn’t just matter for them – it matters for us. At the outset of this scheme some lavishly-paid civil servants blinded themselves with complex explanations around what would have been obvious to the man in the street – paying an uncapped subsidy which is higher than the cost of fuel is disastrous.

Eight years on and after all the scrutiny of RHI, if common sense and basic fairness are still absent from these calculations, what hope can we have that they are present elsewhere in Stormont?

How RHI is managed is one of several tests of whether this new devolved regime has really changed or whether it’s the same old Stormont with a new face.