Debate contribution: Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme (Amendment) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2025

Debate contribution by Mr David Honeyford on 1 December 2025.

MLA

Mr David Honeyford

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

1 December 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme (Amendment) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2025

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5269367

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I echo the comments made by the Chair of the Committee about the departmental staff and the Minister. This time has been a lot different from the previous time. The Committee appreciates the amount of information and the briefings that it has had. The Alliance Party will support the regulations. It is a necessary step in finally drawing a line under the RHI saga. As I have said before, the RHI scheme has been a stain on public confidence and on the credibility of the Assembly. To get it towards closure is of benefit to everybody. RHI has dragged us back for years and held up the kind of modern and ambitious energy strategy that we all need to deliver and that should have been delivered a long time ago. Energy security, as Pádraig has just said, is fundamental. Generating our own home-grown energy is fundamental to families and businesses across Northern Ireland in reducing the price of electricity and, for the wider public, in keeping more money in their pockets, rather than spending it and struggling. Every time that RHI comes back to the Chamber, we are reminded of that scandal, which should never have happened in the first place, and the damage that it has left behind. I see it all the time in the Public Accounts Committee. The shadow of RHI seems to dominate decision-making in the Department and causes fear, caution and hesitation at exactly a time when we need ambition, creativity and momentum to see that energy transition. We look forward to ending that chapter. Today's regulations amend the schedule, and, on paper, they are technical changes. Nothing with RHI is ever simply technical, so everything has to be viewed through the lens of trust, fairness and final closure. The fairness matters: we must be fair to the people who entered the scheme in good faith, invested properly and operated it as intended. It is also about fairness to the public at large, because we will not accept any system dragging us back to days when people were paid for heat that was never generated in the first place. I want to be absolutely clear that, as we move to closure, the Alliance Party will simply not rubber-stamp any repeat of that, and, when it comes to the next stage of closure, we will not give a blank cheque to payments that do not reflect real and genuine renewable heat. I put that on the record, because my concern is that what is presented and what has been presented at the Committee in the upcoming legislation will do that. Tariffs must support environmental transition. Closure must enable us to move forward at pace with renewable schemes but not recreate the mistakes of the past and compensate for failures of oversight. Moving to supervision, even though the rule deals only with tariffs, we cannot ignore the wider issues. We continue to hear suggestions around reducing checks and scaling back inspections, but, given the history here, the Department still has a long way to go to build that trust and credibility. The regulations are fine as far as they go; they make a sensible update and will help to move the scheme towards closure, but they will not and do not rebuild trust on their own. Trust will come only when we have full closure and when that package is fully transparent, fair and evidence-based and is clearly communicated. We support it for moving forward. We are moving forward in the right direction, but we will not support going forward unconditionally, and we will keep demanding accountability, keep pushing for proper oversight and keep insisting that renewable heat policy aligns with our climate objectives. The public deserve and absolutely demand confidence that, when we bring it to a close, lessons have been properly learned — it must be done properly; it has to be done openly — and that, never again, will what happened in the past be repeated in the Assembly.

665 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:03 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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