Renewable Heat Incentive Inquiry examining botched energy scheme
UFU officials Chris Osborne and Wesley Aston face inquiry panel
Inquiry set up after public concern over scheme's huge projected overspend
Retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Patrick Coghlin chairing inquiry at Stormont
Public hearings entering critical phase with high-profile witnesses giving evidence
Sir Patrick Coghlin calls time on what's been a fairly brief appearance by UFU chief executive Wesley Aston.
No such luck for Department for the Economy official Trevor Cooper - he has two full days of questioning starting tomorrow.
We'll be here at the usual time of 09:45 - do join us then.
In the meantime, have a great evening!
BBC News NI
Farmers were unlikely to contact Northern Ireland's biggest agricultural union with concerns about lucrative payments on the RHI scheme, a senior official said.
Image source, RHI InquiryChris Osborne is a senior policy official with the Ulster Farmers' Union with responsibility for renewable energy.
He said he had never been contacted by anyone worried about big payments from the scheme and their potential to make it unsustainable.
The UFU had a responsibility to make sure that it gave a "fulsome, logical and rational response" to a public consultation about the future of the RHI scheme this year.
The union's response was that it wanted the original, highly lucrative subsidies to be reintroduced and the UFU's Chris Osborne was asked this afternoon how that position could be defended given that it would involve further waste of public money.
It's now put to Wesley Aston - he's asked by the inquiry barrister why the union's executive committee didn't weigh in and "temper" the feelings of its members and "produce a more measured, more reasoned and more... public-spirited response".
Image source, RHI InquiryInquiry panellist Dr Keith MacLean also chips in, saying he doesn't understand how the UFU can justify its call for the top-rate subsidies to be reinstated as "the right thing to do" and he can't understand how the union can "stake [its] reputation" on it.
Mr Aston says the consultation was flawed and the union doesn't accept that the reintroduction of the most lucrative subsidies would cost £1bn, as has been suggested.
But he says of the UFU's consultation response: "In hindsight, it should've been qualified... I am taking this opportunity to put the record straight."
In July 2015, DETI officials gave the UFU information about the RHI scheme that had not been signed off by the enterprise minister Jonathan Bell.
Inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin asks if the UFU regularly received information from officials and advisers before ministers had approved it.
Image source, RHI InquiryWesley Aston says he was in regular contact with officials, advisers and politicians "and it was really up to them to tell us what they want to tell us".
Pressed further by the inquiry counsel, Mr Aston says the union wouldn't have known what stage the policy had reached in the Stormont system and whether the minister had signed it off or not.
One of the questions the News Letter's Sam McBride asked the UFU was if the union regretted the stance it took in pressing for a delay to the subsidy cuts in the RHI scheme in the summer of 2015.
Asked for his answer to that now, Wesley Aston says the union regrets the consequence of the delay - a massive spike in applications leading to waste of public money - but he points out that wasn't of the union's making.
"We solely wanted a grace period for those people who had committed to the scheme rather than leaving the scheme open to new applicants."
Asked why he didn't give Mr McBride an answer as straight as that in 2017, Mr Aston says the RHI issue "was just so toxic that no matter what was going to be said was going to be taken up wrong".
The emails that Wesley Aston sent to Dr Andrew Crawford were of a type that were subsequently leaked to the media, prompting questions for the UFU from the News Letter's political editor Sam McBride about its role in pressing for the RHI scheme to remain open.
Mr Aston sent the union's response to those questions to Dr Crawford because "he was the subject of the statement" - he says it was purely out of courtesy and not a case of seeking to validate the union's answers with the DUP adviser.
Image source, RHI InquiryBut he says he didn't ask any questions of Dr Crawford about whether he'd been the person who leaked the emails to the News Letter.
Inquiry barrister Donal Lunny suggests that would've been a "natural" thing to have asked but Mr Aston says: "It may have been obvious now but at the time no."
In January 2017, about a month after the RHI debacle erupted in full public view, Wesley Aston forwarded various emails concerning the scheme to Dr Andrew Crawford.
The emails showed the level of contact there'd been in the summer of 2015 between the UFU's Chris Osborne, UFU committee member and poultry farmer Tom Forgrave and DETI officials about the plan to cut the subsidies offered by the initiative.
The DUP was under huge political pressure at the time and Dr Crawford sent the emails to his adviser colleagues, saying that Mr Aston was "content for us to use this info".
Image source, RHI InquiryMr Aston explains that the union was given "no indication" about what Dr Crawford or the DUP would do with the emails.
He insists that because the emails contained information that the union "had no reason to hide" he was happy to share them and would've done the same had any ministerial adviser sought them.
Asked if he ever thought the DUP might use the emails to shift the media spotlight from Dr Crawford to DETI officials, he says it didn't occur to him at the time.
In his former role as the UFU's policy director, Wesley Aston had been the boss of Dr Andrew Crawford when he worked for the union.
Dr Crawford subsequently became a DUP ministerial adviser and has been a central player in the RHI story.
Mr Aston confirms he had fairly frequent contact with Dr Crawford in his later political roles.
Image source, RHI InquiryInquiry counsel Donal Lunny brings up an embargoed DETI document that Dr Crawford sent to Mr Aston in 2015 and asks if such sharing of internal papers was a regular occurrence.
Mr Aston says it was a press release about the launch of the new Agrifood Strategy Board, something that had been a long time in the planning - the UFU was a key stakeholder and had representation on the board.
There's an "onus" on the UFU to make sure that incentive-type schemes offered by government are operating in a way that protects public money, says Wesley Aston.
And it's "very much" one of the union's objectives to protect against things that might harm the environment or the rural economy, he adds.
Image source, RHI InquiryNo issues about the RHI scheme were raised with the union's executive committee until May 2015 but he accepts that if any sub-committees knew about problems with the initiative they should've flagged those up.
But he adds: "What might appear obvious now maybe at that stage wasn't."
Image source, RHI InquiryThe inquiry's second witness of the day is Wesley Aston, another UFU official.
He's been the chief executive of the union since 2015 and before that he was the UFU's policy director for 20 years.
His witness statement to the inquiry is available here, external.
Northern Ireland's comptroller and auditor general deemed that the RHI scheme was not value for money and it offered unacceptably high rates of return.
In spite of that, the UFU responded to a recent public consultation document with a call for the subsidies that were originally on offer to be reinstated.
Barrister Donal Lunny explains that option offers a rate of return of 100% while most of the other options that were in the consultation were offering rates of about 12% or higher.
Image source, Getty ImagesAsked how the union's position is "responsible or defensible", Chris Osborne says that if it was to support any other option if "would be the equivalent of turkeys voting for Christmas".
He says union members believe the top rate was the "only place where we could ever start" in their negotiations with the Department for the Economy.
Inquiry panellist Dame Una O'Brien asks whether the UFU considered "how on earth" the return of the top subsidies "would ever be afforded" given that "we already know this money doesn't exist".
Mr Osborne says the union has a "duty of care to our membership who have availed of this scheme" but admits that it knew the original subsidies would never be reinstated.
The UFU was not given a tip-off by the then DUP adviser Dr Andrew Crawford that the RHI scheme was closing in February 2016, says Chris Osborne.
But he can't remember how the union found out about the emergency shutdown.
"I've been wracking my brains for the last number of weeks and months and indeed years trying to recall but I still can't remember."
The union issued a press release that was critical of the decision to close the scheme and the short notice given to potential applicants but Mr Osborne says it didn't lobby to try to delay the date for closure.
The UFU met DETI on 22 July 2015 to discuss the RHI scheme and it was told by the civil servants that the initiative was badly over budget, had no "closure button" and no cost controls like those in the similar scheme that was running in Great Britain.
Chris Osborne says his recollection is that DETI said it would find the money it required.
In his witness statement, he says it was at that meeting that the union warned DETI about the dangers of a spike in applications.
The warning concerned "40 new sheds" that would have new RHI-registered boilers fitted were "in the pipeline".
Mr Osborne says he's not sure that the union used the word "spike" but he's confident that it would've been clear to DETI that there was likely to be an increase in applications before the subsidies were cut.
There was an awareness in the UFU in early-July 2015 that cuts to the RHI scheme's subsidies were on the way.
One of Chris Osborne's policy colleagues at the UFU, Elliot Bell, asked him in an email shortly afterwards if he had "any info on if or when" the scheme would become less lucrative because he was "planning the installation of a boiler and wanted to get in quick before they make changes".
Image source, Getty ImagesMr Osborne says he had "nothing to tell" Mr Bell until later that month when he met DETI officials and his memory is that he didn't give his colleague any update on what was happening.
Given that a short time later he received details about the scheme changes from poultry farmer Tom Forgrave, he's asked if he felt he should withhold that information from Mr Bell.
"Not at all... I think it was just down to the fact that I don't think I had any hard facts at that stage to tell him," he says.
When it became aware of the impending cuts to subsidies in the RHI scheme, which would come into effect in the autumn of 2015, the UFU called for a "grace period" for farmers who were planning to install biomass boilers.
Chris Osborne sent an email to DETI officials on the request of poultry farmer Tom Forgrave, who gave evidence to the inquiry in June.
Image source, RHI InquiryThe officials told Mr Osborne that the scheme was running over its budget and urgent action was needed to protect public money.
Asked if the UFU changed its view in light of that response, with public money at risk, he says the union was still supporting its members who had started the process of investing in new heating systems through the RHI.
BBC News NI
Farmers were unlikely to contact Northern Ireland's biggest agricultural union with concerns about lucrative payments on the RHI scheme, a senior official said.
Image source, PacemakerChris Osborne is a senior policy official with the Ulster Farmers' Union with responsibility for renewable energy.
He said he had never been contacted by anyone worried about big payments from the scheme and their potential to make it unsustainable.
Image source, RHI InquiryThe inquiry barrister Donal Lunny begins the day's second session with more questions for Chris Osborne of the UFU.
The inquiry returns at 14:00 to hear a little bit more from Chris Osborne before his UFU colleague Wesley Aston, the union's chief executive, gives evidence.
DETI should've been informed when the UFU was told that the RHI scheme had been "gamed" by some claimants to collect more subsidies, accepts Chris Osborne.
The so-called gaming of the scheme was the practice of claimants installing multiple small boilers instead of a single large unit for their heating needs in order to maximise the amount of money they could receive.
Image source, Getty ImagesThe union was informed in March 2016 that some people registered on the scheme were running their boilers for longer than was needed in order to generate RHI profit.
But Mr Osborne says the UFU didn't pass the message on to DETI because the scheme had closed by that stage and there was an assumption that civil servants would've known about it.
Asked why the union came to that assumption, he admits there was a "naivety".
Inquiry barrister Donal Lunny has presented the inquiry with an array of incidences and documents about the lucrative nature of the RHI scheme that the UFU's Chris Osborne claims didn't come to his attention.
Image source, PA"There seems to have been an awful lot of information very near to you at various points in time about how lucrative this scheme was... none of it seems to have got in front of you," says Mr Lunny.
Mr Osborne replies: "I was surprised whenever [how lucrative the RHI was] actually did land on my doorstep in relation to the middle of 2015."