Ulster Unionist Finance Spokesperson, Steve Aiken OBE MLA, has warned that the temporary measures put in place to reduce the overspend of the ridiculed RHI Scheme are at risk of expiring as there is neither a local Assembly nor direct rule Minister in place to extend them beyond the end of next month.

Dr Steve Aiken said:

“One of the last decisions taken by MLAs before the collapse of the Assembly was to approve a one-year emergency measure to tackle the huge overspend in the RHI scheme. The new rules introduced new tariffs which cut the anticipated overspend from £30m to £2m in this year alone. The current measures are set to expire on the 31st March at the end of the current financial year.

“Whilst I continue to have every sympathy for the genuine applicants to the RHI scheme – many of whom invested hundreds of thousands of pounds of their own money on the back of written assurances by the then Energy Minister Arlene Foster - without cost controls the scheme would cost taxpayers £700m over 20 years.

“At a time of a spiralling funding crisis in our hospitals and schools that simply could not have been allowed to happen. Even Mr Justice Colton acknowledged the unfairness of the situation during his ruling last December on the new tariffs, but he too found there was a compelling public interest for the changes.

“The current arrangements were always intended to be a temporary measure in order to give the Department of Economy here the opportunity to develop the long-term arrangements needed. It’s regrettable that over 12 months later not a single new solution has been found.

“Last summer the Department announced that it would be seeking a further 12-month extension of the current temporary measures until 31 March 2019. The reality is however that this would either require assembly approval or sign-off by a direct rule Minister - of which we have neither.

“There is every possibility that the current stalemate at Stormont will rumble on well beyond the 31st March so there is a real danger taxpayers here will again end up paying huge sums for the botched RHI Scheme. That mustn’t be allowed to happen. As a new Permanent Secretary at the Department of the Economy takes post today, and there is little indication that any attempt has been made to grasp this issue, we ask that the UK Government urgently intervenes to take whatever steps necessary to ensure that Parliament can approve an extension to the current measures, even if this is interpreted by some as one step further towards direct rule.”