I will try to address a series of specific points that various Members have made during the course of this debate. I will also try to address some of the
broader questions, some of them quite fundamental, about the RHI scheme and its many and manifest problems and shortcomings. That is partly because those issues were raised in the debate, but also because we are going on to consider an amendment in Committee and it may help to have a bigger shared fact base. This will not answer all the questions that will, quite rightly, be raised in Committee, but it may at least lay the foundations of that debate and help us to address them at that stage.
As the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) rightly said, we have had quite a narrow debate although with widely shared views across the House. I strongly agree with one point that she made at the end of her remarks, which is that it is easy to forget, amid all the concern about the flaws in the RHI scheme, that it was introduced for a very noble purpose as part of an attempt to decarbonise our economy by increasing the amount of renewable energy in Northern Ireland. That is part of a broader tapestry of other initiatives that are being introduced right across the UK and, indeed, in other countries around the world. We clearly should not lose sight of that—it is a vitally important point.