Renewable Heat Incentive Inquiry examining botched energy scheme
Head of NI Civil Service and ex-DETI chief David Sterling returns to inquiry
Former DETI energy boss John Mills faces inquiry questions for first time
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 evidence sessions expected to last until well into 2018
Image source, ReutersBusy enough aul' day at the RHI Inquiry and Mr Mills will be back to answer more questions tomorrow morning from 09:45.
Thanks for following our coverage - good evening for now!
BBC News Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland's most senior civil servant denied that the department he formerly ran was a "serial offender" in terms of problems with public money.
Image source, Press EyeIt was suggested to David Sterling, who headed DETI during the set-up and initial running of the RHI scheme, that the department had not learned lessons from two previous projects that had seen money squandered.
He acknowledged that the civil service has much work to do to to regain public trust after the RHI debacle.
Inquiry counsel Mr Scoffield asks why Mr Mills didn't ask for a project management approach to the RHI scheme even though he thought it had been needed.
"Did you raise the issue and if not, why not?" he asks.
Image source, Getty Images"No, I didn't and yes, I should have done" Mr Mills replies.
"I probably thought it was too big a job to convince the department to take a more planned approach as opposed to the 'just get it done' attitude," he adds.
"Project management would just get in the way of that."
DETI's plan to develop the RHI scheme in 2014 had originally included the addition of cost controls and the opening of a similar initiative for domestic users.
That was put to public consultation but the budget protection measures later fell by the wayside.
Mr Mills decided that rolling out the domestic programme could go ahead of adding cost controls to the original scheme which would be dealt with later - they ultimately didn’t happen.
He believed that both of those things couldn't have been done at the same time, given the scant staffing resources at his disposal.
Asked why the domestic scheme was pushed ahead, he says "these decisions seemed to me to have been taken before my arrival" and he simply "followed the advice I was given" in rubber-stamping it.
One of the conditions of approval for the RHI scheme was that a full review of it would be conducted by the start of 2014.
But that never happened and an important opportunity to spot some of the defects was therefore missed.
Image source, Getty ImagesMr Mills says the message wasn't passed on to him by management when he joined the department that the review was of "critical" importance.
He says it wasn't in any planning documents for the energy division when he arrived and "if it really was that front and centre" it should've been outlined somewhere.
Inquiry panellist and civil service expert Dame Una O'Brien seems incredulous that Mr Mills did not press for a meeting with his line manager at DETI on taking up a new job with no overlap with his predecessor.
"It just seems an obvious step," she says, asking if he thought it would not have been worthwhile to "get their steer" on things.
Image source, RHI InquiryMr Mills replies that there were regular meetings with more senior civil servants on energy issues.
"There was contact within those structures," he adds.
The "priority" when he arrived at DETI, says Mr Mills, was getting the domestic RHI scheme opened and he "did not disagree or depart from that".
But inquiry panellist Dr MacLean notes a passage in the Mr Mills' written statement to the inquiry, he says that it was himself who "made it the branch's priority".
Image source, Getty ImagesThe witness insists now he "did not make a conscious decision" to put the domestic scheme at the top of the priority list, saying that had already been done by someone else before he arrived at DETI.
He says there'd been "continued promises" from before his time at the department to get the domestic initiative up and running, and failure to fulfill those led to "exasperation" from the minister.
Image source, PAMr Mills's "general impression" from the handover meeting with Ms Hepper was that the RHI scheme was "not a prominent issue, full stop".
He says the only concern about it was that uptake was "very slow" and money allocated for it was therefore going unspent and being handed back to the Treasury.
In her account of the half-day handover session with Mr Mills, Ms Hepper says she "talked him through the key issues" of the RHI scheme. Among those were:
Image source, Getty ImagesMr Mills says he "would dispute whether they were highlighted" to him.
He says he can't remember everything that was discussed because there was an "alphabet soup of different concepts" that were run past him.
Swiss cheese, alphabet soup... something of a foodie theme today!
There was no overlap between Ms Hepper and Mr Mills in the energy boss role at DETI because she left several weeks before he filled the vacancy.
Mr Mills says it would've been helpful if they had worked alongside each other for a while.
Image source, Getty ImagesHe explains that's because there were "big decisions" that were "thrust upon you" as soon as he took up the role and he was reluctant to make them given how new to it he was.
There was only a half-day briefing session - probably in November 2013 - during which Ms Hepper outlined the role and its responsibilities to Mr Mills.
Mark Twain has made an unlikely appearance, with Mr Mills is referring to the famous novelist and wit as he explains the term "streamlining information".
He says both Mr Sterling and a ministerial advisor Andrew Crawford used that term when referring to keeping the then minister Mrs Foster informed on energy matters.
Image source, Library of CongressMr Scoffield suggests their advice meant: "Keep it short, essentially".
"Slightly unfair," says Mr Mills, explaining that he took it to mean to be succinct and highlight the main points to the minister.
He quotes a Twain line: "Sorry I wrote you a long letter. I would have written you a shorter one if I had had time."
Mr Mills succeeded Fiona Hepper as DETI's energy boss after she left the post in November 2013.
Ms Hepper had committed far more time to the role than the usual nine-to-five hours - she's told the inquiry that she often took work home at evenings and weekends.
Image source, RHI InquiryBefore taking up the role, Mr Mills told DETI's permanent secretary Mr Sterling that due to family reasons he couldn't work beyond normal office hours, and he was assured that wouldn't be a problem.
But he tells the inquiry that he soon found the job to be "extremely heavily loaded", with some "extremely impenetrable" work to be done on projects of real "complexity".
At his appraisal at the end of his first year in the post, he told a senior manager that the role required someone who "could devote more hours to it than I could".
Next up is John Mills - he's been mentioned many times in other witnesses' evidence to the inquiry so far.
That's because he managed the energy team at DETI - which was responsible for the RHI scheme - from January 2014 through a key period when a range of things went badly wrong with the initiative.
Image source, RHI InquiryHe joined the civil service in 1987, starting out at the justice department and he later worked as the head of water policy at the then Department for Regional Development (DRD) before moving to DETI in 2016.
He no longer works at DETI, having moved to Stormont's Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in May 2016.
You can find his full written statement to the inquiry here, external.
How much of the RHI debacle is the personal responsibility of Mr Sterling?
That's the question asked by the inquiry barrister Mr Scoffield, one that he himself admits is "blunt".
"I'm not trying to duck this but I think it's for the inquiry to reach that judgement", is Mr Sterling's reply.
Image source, RHI Inquiry"If there are issues with my performance or conduct there are processes within the service for dealing with those."
He's sought to provide the inquiry with a "fair and honest assessment of my own contribution to this" but it's "difficult to provide that overall conclusion" about what failures land squarely on his plate.
After two-and-a-half days sitting in the witness chair, Mr Sterling is released to get back to his desk and probably get into tackling a big inbox...
The handover process between the staff working on the RHI scheme did not work well and lessons need to be learned, acknowledges Mr Sterling.
Within the space of a few months, the three people working most closely on the project all left DETI, meaning that crucial knowledge of how it operated was lost to the department.
Image source, Getty ImagesTheir successors had little or no expertise on renewable energy matters, never mind a knowledge of the RHI scheme.
Mr Sterling says the handover should've been more thorough to ensure that key details - priorities, important deadlines, etc - "weren't capable of being lost or forgotten".
The civil service will look at a new process, he adds, requiring staff to sign off that they understand what they're taking on and accept the responsibilites of their new role.
Image source, Getty ImagesNumerous lapses in good governance - "the holes in the Swiss cheese" - all lined up to cause the catastrophe of the RHI scheme, according to inquiry panellist Dame Una O'Brien.
The former senior Whitehall civil servant says the auditing of the project was "such a crucial piece of the internal governance", but of course, it was one of the important checks that didn't happen.
Neasa Murnaghan QC, representing the Department for the Economy - formerly DETI - made the same fromagey analogy in her opening statement to the inquiry back in November.
There was "no good, hard look" at the RHI scheme by DETI's auditors in its first three years of operation, says inquiry barrister Mr Scoffield.
Asked if that's acceptable, civil service boss Mr Sterling says again that a careful examination of the initiative should've taken place.
Image source, Getty ImagesHe says a "fairly thorough review" would've caused some "pertinent questions" to be asked about whether the scheme was working as had been planned.
Inquiry panellist Dr MacLean suggests that even just a "cursory glance" at some of the figures from the initiative would've enabled civil servants to see that its budget was running out of control.
Image source, RHI InquiryBack after lunch, Mr Scoffield tells the inquiry that his final set of questions for Mr Sterling should be take no longer than an hour.
After that we'll be hearing from John Mills, DETI's former energy boss.
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It's an earlier-than-usual break for lunch today because there's an unveiling of a new portrait of Martin McGuinness in the Great Hall here at Parliament Buildings.
We'll pick up proceedings just after 13:00.
Image source, Getty ImagesThe RHI scheme was not earmarked for a full audit review by DETI, even though it was incredibly complex and had hundreds of millions of pounds of public money flowing through it over its 20-year lifetime.
Mr Sterling admits that it should've been more closely scrutinsed.
Audit resources were diverted to cover the department's telecoms work as a result of the failings in the Bytel project, and the examination of other programmes fell down the priority list.