Foster was warned of heating scheme ‘madness’, says whistleblower

A whistleblower said on Thursday that she warned First Minister Arlene Foster and officials from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Industry of serious flaws in a renewable heating scheme.

The whistleblower said she contacted Ms Foster in 2013 when she was the department’s minister and officials from her department in 2014 and 2015 about the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme which could cost the Northern Executive and the North’s taxpayers more than £400 million over the next 20 years.

The woman, who runs a heating company, said she visited businesses which availed of the scheme and left their heating on constantly because “the more they heated, the more money they made”.

The controversy over the scheme has put pressure on the DUP First Minister.

The Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt said she should resign over the "scandal" while SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said she should appear before the Assembly's Public Accounts Committee, which is investigating the matter, to account for the "scandal-ridden" scheme.

The DUP has been dismissive of the resignation calls while Ms Foster, who is in China on a trade mission, has said she "did all that was appropriate in the circumstances" and passed on the warnings for her officials to investigate.

The scheme was modelled on an English project designed to encourage users to switch from fossil fuel systems to biomass heating systems such as wood-burning boilers.

The acknowledged flaw however was that there was no cap on usage, as there is in England, while the Northern Ireland scheme paid out more in subsidies that the fuel costs. This meant that the more fuel that was burned the more profit the users made.

It is estimated that over the 20 years of the scheme it could contractually cost the Northern Executive and therefore the taxpayer more than £400 million.

‘Hitting a brick wall’

The whistleblower told BBC Radio Ulster's Stephen Nolan Show that she pointed this out to Ms Foster and her officials in 2013, 2014 and 2015 but her warnings were not acted on. "It felt like I was hitting a brick wall," she said.

The system was availed of by people such as farmers, hoteliers and business owners. “It took five minutes of a just, normal person looking online to realise it wasn’t right,” she said.

“I would go into hotels, maybe care homes, and it would be 24 degrees outside, the heat is still on and the windows are open,” she said.

“I went into an office one time, not that long ago, and they [the business] were tenants. It was really warm, they had the windows open. Basically the landlord was just heating all the time,” she added.

She said the scheme was “madness” but that you “can’t really blame those people when it’s made attractive to them in that way”.

Some 1,946 applications for the scheme (98 per cent of the total) were approved with 984 received in September, October and November 2015 after officials announced plans to cut the subsidy but before that change took effect. The scheme was halted earlier this year.

A spokeswoman for new Department for the Economy, which replaced the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Industry, said that the names of those approved for the scheme cannot be named under data protection legislation. It is understood that Sinn Féin is challenging this interpretation of the data law.