Debate contribution: RHI (Closure of the Non-Domestic Scheme) Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr David Honeyford on 20 October 2025.

MLA

Mr David Honeyford

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

20 October 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

RHI (Closure of the Non-Domestic Scheme) Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5188332

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I will be clear from the start: we in Alliance support the principle of completely closing down the RHI scheme and bringing that sorry chapter to an end. RHI has been an absolute disaster from the beginning. It effectively collapsed the Assembly, because it was conceived and implemented without oversight and managed with arrogance.

It was a textbook example of greed enabled by government failure. That happened under the DUP's watch. They were, apparently, under the belief that, "Treasury will pick up the Bill, so what does it matter?", so here we are today.

That approach led to reckless decisions that cost our public finances dearly. More importantly, however, as is often emphasised, it shattered public confidence in the institutions and continues to cast a shadow over the Department. We see and hear that every time the Department comes before the Committee. It has massively delayed progress towards net zero targets and energy security. In dealing with renewable energy, it has caused there to be caution in moving towards any new scheme to secure the future energy of the island — they come at a snail's pace, although we need them in place yesterday — whether utilising wind, solar, biogas or hydrogen. I sit on the Public Accounts Committee, where, all the time, I can see, from various Departments, although most pointedly from the Department for the Economy, that RHI single-handedly further destroyed Civil Service confidence in taking any decisions, limiting creativity within the Departments and thus holding us back from entrepreneurship or creative ideas to tackle today's problems. By continuing to do the same thing over and over again, we continue to deliver the same outcomes. We in the Chamber have to be honest: it was the DUP Minister of the day who oversaw and brought us RHI. The damage to politics in Northern Ireland that followed was a direct result of their political negligence. It now passes to us all — it is our collective responsibility — to bring RHI and this chapter to an end and to do so in an orderly, transparent and fair way. This should have been sorted out years ago. The fact that we are talking about it today illustrates the failure of successive Economy Ministers, alongside stop-start government, to bring this to an end and deal with it. That is a disgrace. This action has been forced by Ofgem: the timeline is being controlled by Ofgem, not by the Minister or the Department. The Ofgem deadline has created the circumstances that have brought us here today. I will tease out my core concerns. The Bill is short. It grants the Department the power to make regulations, without any of us or the public being able to scrutinise those regulations in their final form. Effectively, we are being asked to sign a blank cheque to the Department that originally delivered the RHI scheme and to trust that, this time, the detail will be right. That is not good enough for me, and it is certainly not good enough for those who expect us to have learnt lessons. We need a Bill that brings confidence that bringing this to a close enables learning and allows us to move forward with confidence, free from the shackles of RHI. On the subject of the proposed regulations and fairness, the Department's consultation proposes that payments will be based on the figures for historical generation, from 2017-19. There is a question over why those years were chosen. The Minister addressed that today, and we were also given an explanation at Committee. We are told that the level of payment at that time was fair, but why, then, has the number of users halved since then? How can the data from nearly a decade ago accurately reflect the current usage, the current technology or our environmental targets? If the Department truly intends to close the scheme, why does it propose that it will continue payments for another 10 years, running out the original 20-year term from 2012? Surely, that is an extension of RHI rather than an end to it. That does not sound like closure; it sounds like running down the clock on a flawed system. Can the Minister confirm absolutely, today, that the Treasury has signed off on the plan and that it agrees with the regulations that are to come and with the approach that the Department has taken? Can she confirm that it will enable the Assembly to, at last, access central funding for other renewable schemes that has been denied to us over the past years? It is critical that we hear the answers to those questions and that we can actually move forward. We need to a clear explanation of how the Bill delivers value for money and how it delivers on our climate objectives. Confidence in renewables starts with confidence in governance. Frankly, we cannot build tomorrow's energy on yesterday's mistakes. I hope that the Minister will give a reassurance that the environmental benefits that come from the scheme will not be lost; that we will not have another decade of delay dressed up as delivery, which we cannot afford; and that the Bill will ensure fairness for all those who participated in good faith but will not allow others to take advantage. The proposed payment model also raises plenty of questions. Paying for heat that is not generated is not reform; it is repetition of previous mistakes. If I produce 51% output but get 100% payment, or if I produce 6% output but get 50% payment, how does that deliver value for money to the public purse? That is not policy; it is paying for inactivity. How can the public have faith in a system that rewards outputs that do not exist? Those who invested in good faith deserve fairness, not a fudge, but fairness cannot mean overpaying for boilers that are not running to the percentage for which payment is being made or are not even running. The Department cannot claim that lessons have been learned if the new model still rewards inefficiency and penalises integrity. The rate has obviously been too low for some time: is backdating payments to pay for heat that has not been generated the way to go? When it comes to oversight, fraud and inspection, the Department says that it will remove the need for quarterly meter readings and will rely instead on an annual declaration and occasional inspections. Given the advancement of technology since the RHI scheme came in, why are we moving backwards? Why did the Department go for fewer checks? I hope that the Minister will give us a clear answer to that. Surely there are now digital solutions, as Phillip mentioned — simple solutions that can easily monitor usage in real time and would cost less than creating a new inspection regime to make visits. The entire RHI scandal was caused by a lack of proper monitoring and oversight. If we remove even the few checks that remain, how can we be confident that the fraud will not creep back in? We have been told that there will be a new fraud policy, so I would like the Department to spell out clearly what that will look like. At the Committee a while back, we heard that every boiler will be visited once over the next 10 years. If you think that through, you realise that, if a boiler is checked next year, the owner can be pretty confident that it will not be checked again for the entire 10 years of the scheme. How will that work in practice? Why should we believe that the control this time will be different from the first scheme's control, which failed so comprehensively? Moreover, we have seen no evidence that the Department has resourced the necessary inspection regime to ensure that the boilers are still in genuine use or that the heat generated is being used for the purpose for which the boilers were installed. Previously, the headline was "Cash for ash": we must be absolutely confident that we do not see a repeat of that. Today is 20 October. Why is this being done now? We have been told that closing the RHI scheme is urgent, yet we have had years in which to do so. If it is urgent today, it was urgent years ago. The Minister could have introduced the Bill at any time. Given that it is two and a half pages long, no Member will believe that it has not been drafted for some time. If it has been, why was it not introduced before now? We cannot wait until the process has almost timed out. The consultation was launched only at the end of last month and will close at the end of November, yet the Bill is before us today. This time last year, I asked a question about the Bill at Committee and was told that it would be introduced in the new year. Everybody in the room was pretty clear that "new year" meant January or February. Technically, nobody misled the Committee. Technically, officials answered correctly — it is still 2025 — but, by goodness, introducing the Bill at the end of October, almost a year later, is stretching the understanding of what was said. Stretching that understanding stretches the trust that we have in the Department, so I look for things that the Department is hiding. If the Department could have brought forward tariff adjustments or closure arrangements any time sooner, I am left wondering why it did not. Why did it take 18 months of behind-the-scenes work to consult with just three groups and arrive at a proposal that leaves many unanswered questions? That leaves me with a feeling that introduction may have been deliberately left to the last minute to try to bypass Committee Stage and force through the Bill regardless of anyone's opinion. If that is the case, it will be a new low and another push against the trust that the Committee has built up, working together to deliver better for people.

We are being asked to trust a Department that designed, oversaw and defended the original RHI scheme. Such trust must be earned, but it has not been. The Department has done little to change that opinion and given little reassurance that it is on top of this. Alliance supports the principle of the scheme's closure, but it must be done in the right way. I am disappointed at how the Bill has been rushed, thus limiting Committee and Assembly time to debate it. Given that we had a similar debate a year ago, during which we were told that the Bill would be introduced in the new year, the measure should not be hidden behind departmental regulations and definitely should not come at the expense of fairness and transparency. We will not give the Department a blank cheque. We will not endorse a process that risks repeating the failures that caused the scandal in the first place. We cannot end one scandal yet create the conditions for the next one. I look forward to hearing the Minister answer the questions that have been raised and to having her reassure the House that the Department is in control and has the ability to deliver what it says that it will. In moving forward, our constituents from across the region deserve to know that the lessons from the mistakes of RHI have been learnt and that a process is in place to make sure that they are never repeated. Our constituents also deserve a Department that does not live under a cloud because of the ghost of RHI by progressing a Bill that is simply a quiet extension of the scheme under a different name. Legislate properly and openly, and let us finally bring that sorry chapter to an end in a way that commands the respect of everyone in the House.

1,993 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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