You know a scandal must be serious when it gets a catchy name of its own. ‘Cash for Ash’ originated as a well-intentioned idea. The Department for Enterprise, Trade and Investment, under the then leadership of Arlene Foster, wanted to encourage farmers and businesses to switch energy source from fossil fuels to environmentally friendlier wood chip boilers. The incentive? Eligible individuals and businesses could apply for a generous subsidy if they made the ‘green’ switch.

The problem? The scheme was severely flawed from the start. Subsidies were worth more than the cost of fuel itself. The lack of a cap on the amount of money that could be claimed encouraged widespread abuse, with boilers needlessly generating heat around the clock, hence the emergent horror stories of farmers being paid six-figure sums for heating empty sheds and taxpayers’ money being used to heat Charles Hurst’s Ferrari showroom for (potentially) the next 20 years under the legitimate terms of contracts.

It is projected that the scheme will overspend by £400 million over the next two decades. Yes, that’s nearly half a billion pounds. Whatever the final overspend, it’s clear that the scheme has been a policy disaster. The question is, who should be held accountable for it? Who knew about the problems, and when? Does the failure to prevent this scandalous waste of public money ultimately rest with the minister at the time of the scheme’s inception, Arlene Foster?

This morning the DUP lined up Gregory Campbell to answer some of these very awkward questions from the BBC’s Stephen Nolan. As an MP rather than a member of the Assembly, let alone a minister of the Executive, this was perhaps a strange choice of person to nominate as the party spokesman to answer the array of pertinent questions.

Of course, it didn’t take long to discover from Nolan’s interview just how little the DUP ultimately had to say on the matter. Campbell started off by questioning the premise of Nolan’s assertion that hundreds of millions of pounds were being squandered as a result of policy failures.

There appears to be a repeated mantra that the hundreds of millions of pounds, rather than potentially over the course of the next twenty years, has already been wasted and squandered and spent and gone up in smoke. … And that hasn’t been the case. … It is not the case that hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent, never mind squandered.

Nolan interjected to point out that even if the money has not physically been spent to date, it has already been committed due to contract obligations. In other words, the money can’t simply be reallocated to something else. If your strongest point going into an interview is over which tense is used – whether hundreds of millions of pounds have already been wasted, or whether hundreds of millions of pounds are yet to be wasted – things aren’t going to end well.

Not backing down, of course, Gregory Campbell demanded an apology from Stephen Nolan for describing “projected” waste rather than “actual” waste. Nolan, likewise, was defiant, vowing to “keep digging” on the scandal. This prompted a surreal threat from Campbell:

See whenever people dig in for information, just always remember, Stephen, that’s a two-way process. Just remember that, that’s a two-way process.

It isn’t clear what precisely Mr Campbell meant by this threat, but his very repetition leaves little room for doubt that it was indeed a threat. A Member of Parliament was effectively warning a journalist not to do his job. In a liberal democracy.

Back to the substantive questions, Nolan pressed Campbell on the sequence of events. If the energy regulator, Ofgem, were raising alarm bells with government officials in 2015, why were remedies not immediately put in place to address the scheme’s obvious flaws?

I don’t know. (Raising his voice) Well how would I know? How would I know what Ofgem were telling the department 15 months ago. I wasn’t in the Department. I wasn’t on the committee. I wasn’t the minister.

That, ultimately, is the point. If the DUP really had anything substantive or reassuring to tell the public, it would not have put Gregory Campbell to be the party’s spokesman on the Nolan Show. The public deserves answers on this scandalous policy failure and, so far, we have not been given them.

 

If you want to listen to the full exchange, you can catch it here: https://audioboom.com/posts/5390459-dup-s-gregory-campbell-clashes-with-stephen-over-the-cash-for-ash-scandal-pt-1