Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Chambers says he felt the need "to be fairly clear and direct" to the consultants about Letby's grievance. In it, there were allegations that derogatory and inappropriate language had been used.

"I wanted to be clear that that didn’t meet the values of the organisation and that we needed to not see any further examples of that," he says.

Chambers continues: "I didn’t feel that I was raising my voice, I certainly wasn’t angry. I felt that I behaved professionally, as they did, as everybody in the meeting did, and that was my recollection of that meeting."

It was during this meeting that consultants were told Letby would be coming back to work on the neonatal unit.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The inquiry moves on to examine the minutes of a meeting held on 26 January 2017, which was attended by consultants, executives and the hospital's medical and nursing directors.

In part the meeting was to tell the consultants about the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) review - none of them had been shown the full version.

Nicholas de la Poer KC says different recollections have emerged from those in attendance about Chambers' behaviour.

"Some have said you behaved in an oppressive, overbearing, or bullying way. I want to give you the opportunity to say whether you would recognise that description of yourself," he says.

Chambers replies: "I remember this meeting I remember it being very tense, I didn’t really understand why."

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The inquiry is now shown an email that consultant Dr Ravi Jayaram sent to Tony Chambers on 20 September 2016.

In it, Jayaram says: "I have a group of colleagues who do not feel that they are being listened to, or valued by the trust and consequently fear that our relationship with senior management is breaking down."

Inquiry counsel Nicholas de la Poer KC tries to move on to a new line of inquiry, but Chambers asks to speak about the email.

"One of the things that you find as a chief executive unfortunately is that you find yourself apologising for all sorts of things that other people had done, that you knew nothing about," he says.

He adds that the context of the email was to do with the consultants being angry over an issue with the hospital’s fundraising appeal for a new neonatal unit.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Chambers is now told about comments from the former chairman of the hospital board, Sir Duncan Nichol.

Nichol has previously said the board was misled by executives at the hospital, after being told there was no criminal activity pointing to any one individual.

In response, Chambers tells the inquiry: "We would never mislead the board."

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

De la Poer points out to Chambers that none of the experts were asked to deal with the question of whether deliberate harm might have been caused.

Chambers denies this. "They said there was no evidence," he says.

"My understanding of what I was being told and reading was that there was nothing pointing to unnatural causes."

De la Poer asks if there is "a possibility that you were misunderstanding what the reports were saying?"

"I don’t think that’s fair," Chambers replies.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Tony Chambers is now asked about a meeting of the hospital board on 10 January 2017.

The minutes show that the former hospital CEO told the board that "there was an unsubstantiated explanation that there was a causal link to an individual. This is not the case."

Inquiry counsel Nicholas de la Poer KC asks him: “So you are telling the board that it isn’t the case that Letby is responsible for the increase in deaths?"

Chambers says he "can see that there can be a legal set of arguments here - but at the time, everything we were being told by experts, independent neonatology experts, was that there was no evidence of deliberate harm."

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The inquiry moves on to a meeting on 16 March 2017, when Chambers was told about a conversation HR director Sue Hodkinson had had with consultant Dr Ravi Jayaram the previous day.

In that conversation, Jayaram told Hodkinson about three suspicious occasions involving Letby and a premature baby girl known as Baby K. Letby has since been convicted of attempting to murder Baby K.

The baby was deteriorating in February 2016 and had a dislodged breathing tube. Jayaram walked into the room and found Letby standing by doing nothing.

Chambers says he spoke to Jayaram briefly after learning about this disclosure.

Asked if he asked for more information, Chambers says he does not recall asking the consultant directly about the revelation.

Nicholas de la Poer KC asks: "Wasn't that what you needed to do?"

"I suppose so, yes," Chambers replies, "but I didn’t want to put him in a position where he was being in anyway coerced. I wanted to give him a safe environment to express his concerns in an open way."

Chambers did not pass information on the disclosure to the police as possible eye witness evidence.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

De la Poer asks that if this was an attempt by Letby to take control and get what she wanted, and go on the offensive. Did Letby succeed in recruiting Chambers to her goals?

He says "no, I don’t think so at all".

"My take on this was the only thing that Lucy Letby wanted was something that acknowledged that she had been treated unfairly and she sought no other redress other than to get back to her job that she really loved."

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

At the same meeting, Chambers told the nurse: "Lucy, don't worry. We've got your back."

When asked by de la Poer, he says that the language he used was "clumsy".

"Eight years on, with what we know now and we look at this, these are the kind of things that you know you didn’t get right," he adds.

Minutes from the meeting note that Chambers told Letby that the RCPCH review had "vindicated her", but he accepts to the inquiry that it didn't, because it didn't investigate her.

He adds, though, that the RCPCH review "also didn’t point to any unnatural causes" for the deaths of the babies.

He adds that he wasn't taking the approach at that time that Letby had been vindicated by the review.

"I was very conscious to try as much as possible to avoid further escalation - particularly from her father. Her father wasn’t at this meeting, but I was very aware of his presence," he says.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Letby told executives that she didn’t want anything on her personnel record about having been taken off duty.

De la Poer asks Chambers whether "this something that struck you as being her inappropriately trying to control the situation?”

Chambers says he didn't see anything problematic about it and it didn’t strike him as unreasonable at the time.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The inquiry has resumed. Tony Chambers is asked about another meeting that he held with Lucy Letby on 6 February, 2017.

He told Letby that she would be getting an apology from consultants who had raised concerns about her.

She responded: "I expect four apologies."

Counsel to the inquiry Nicholas de la Poer KC asks: "Did you feel in this meeting that Letby was trying to take control of what was going on?"

Chambers replies: "I think that was an attempt on her behalf, yes. I think there was no doubt that she felt incredibly aggrieved and perhaps this was her moment to have her matters of grievance properly aired."

De La Poer asks if he agrees that Letby's behaviour was "manipulative".

Chambers replies: "I didn’t feel that I was being manipulated at the time... it was the father who seemed to be pulling the strings rather than Letby herself."

• As a reminder, Lucy Letby has been convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another seven between 8 June 2015 and 24 June 2016

As the Thirlwall Inquiry is on a break, let's recap the key lines from Tony Chambers' evidence so far.

As a reminder, he was the boss of the hospital where Lucy Letby murdered seven babies in 2015 and 2016, and has been accused of being too slow to respond to doctors' concerns:

• Chambers began by saying he was "truly sorry" for the "pain that may have been prolonged by any decisions or actions that I took in good faith"

• He said he first learned of doctors' concerns on 29 June 2016, five days after the death of the last baby Letby murdered
• He said the concerns about Letby were "very shocking" to hear, but that "we wouldn't jump to criminality as the causal factor"
• On 27 March 2017, a consultant told Chambers that police should be involved. Chambers agreed, but after consulting a criminal lawyer, Chambers only informed police - via a letter to the chief constable - on 2 May. The first meeting with police was 5 May
• The inquiry heard that Letby was taken off duty in the neonatal unit in 2016, but was told at a December 2016 meeting that she would be allowed back
• At the meeting, Chambers said Letby's father was "very angry [at her treatment]. He was making threats... threatened guns to my head"
• Chambers also accepted that, at this meeting, he said "for your resilience Lucy, you astound me"

Nicholas de la Poer asks Chambers about his comments that Letby's resilience "astounded" him.

"Have you ever made such a statement in relation to the consultants for the bravery that they showed when trying to speak out to keep babies safe?" he asks.

Chambers says: "Yes, in many of the meetings that took place in June and July 2016.

"All of the meetings then I was thanking everybody for their contributions."

The inquiry now heads on a lunch break.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Chambers says that Letby's father was "very angry" and "he was making threats" at their meeting in December 2016. He adds that "he was threatening guns to my head".

Chambers acknowledges that he might not have gotten the handling of the meeting right, adding that he was just trying to "take the heat out of the situation" with Letby's father.

At this meeting, Chambers is recorded as twice saying "for your resilience Lucy, you astound me", and he accepts that he said this.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Chambers is now being questioned about a meeting he had with Lucy Letby and her parents on 22 December 2016.

He is recorded as telling the nurse at this meeting that she would be going back to work on the neonatal unit - after a grievance complaint from Letby at having been taken off duty was upheld in her favour.

Chambers says says "this was one area where perhaps I didn’t get the communications right".

"Letby’s family, it’s fair to say were very upset and very angry about how they felt she’d been treated unfairly by the trust," he says.

"I’m prepared to accept that we had not been open and honest with her at the time."

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The second, confidential, version of the RCPCH report was not shown to consultants until the start of February 2017 - but was provided to the hospital trust executives in November of the previous year.

Chambers is asked if he agrees that delaying its publication until then put patients at risk.

He does not agree with this.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The inquiry is now moving on to a hospital board meeting on 10 January 2017.

The RCPCH report was handed out there. It contained six points under the heading "immediate recommendations".

In the minutes for that board meeting, Chambers is recorded as saying the report made "a number of recommendations although nothing immediate".

Asked by Nicholas de la Poer KC whether this was a false statement, Chambers disagrees.

"It’s important to understand that an immediate recommendation is one that you take action on that day, where there is an immediate patient safety risk. There was nothing in the RCPCH review that I felt into that category," he says.

De la Poer challenges this: "So although there was a heading ‘immediate recommendations’ you didn’t think there were immediate recommendations?"

Chambers restates his previous answer, adding that "its almost one where, for example, the Care Quality Commission come in and they see something and they almost press the stop button. … I didn’t read those recommendations in that way."

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Chambers is asked whether the hospital trust's executive directors should have gone back to Dr Jane Hawdon - who led the RCPCH review - to ask what the significance of her findings were after the review said that four of the baby deaths were unexplained.

In response, Chambers says that nothing at all within the review pointed to anything suspicious.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Nicholas de la Poer KC presses Chambers to answer a question about what the document says about the department's leadership.

Chambers accepts that it’s not unreasonable to say that the thrust of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) report was that the neonatal unit was well led.

He also accepts that the review did not say that staffing levels were an explanation for the rise in mortality levels - the number of deaths - on the neonatal unit.

Judith Moritz
Special correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

The RCPCH produced two reports as a result of its review - one public, and the other confidential and kept by executives.

Chambers is asked about what the public, or "dissemination", copy said about leadership on the neonatal unit where Letby worked.

"We had some brilliant doctors working there who worked really hard. We also had some wonderful nurses working there who too worked hard," he says.

"The relationships between the two could change by a shift. This was a unit that was under significant pressure. This was a unit that had gaps in the nursing rotas and these were things that we were seeking to resolve."