Renewable Heat Incentive Inquiry examining botched energy scheme
Arlene Foster's former ministerial adviser faces inquiry panel 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
We've reached the end of today's proceedings but that's by no means the end of questions for Dr Crawford - he'll be back for more tomorrow morning.
Image source, ReutersWe're off to peruse Mrs Foster's witness statement.
Join us again tomorrow for more coverage from Stormont at 09:45 sharp - see you then!
Arlene Foster's former ministerial adviser said he did not try to keep the RHI scheme open as it ran out of budgetary control in 2015.
Image source, PacemakerHe was referring to an accusation that was made against him by a senior Stormont civil servant in January last year, which led to Dr Crawford's resignation soon afterwards.
He said the claim "runs contrary to what I was doing at that time" and he had provided the inquiry with evidence that proved he had not been seeking to keep the scheme open.
DETI set up an RHI scheme for Northern Ireland even though a nearly identical-initiative was already running in Great Britain, operated by a Whitehall department.
DECC, which set up the GB scheme, had 77 people working on the project - in contrast, DETI had just two and one of those was part-time.
Some witnesses - including civil service boss David Sterling - have said in retrospect that DETI should probably never have got into creating its own scheme because it was "a project too far for us".
Image source, Getty ImagesDr Crawford is asked whether - when the complexity of the project dawned on civil servants - any consideration was given to finding another way, such as joining the GB scheme.
He says the minister should've been told about problems and "we could have looked at other options".
"If it made economic sense for the people of Northern Ireland to join the UK scheme there would be no difficulty on our behalf of doing that."
Ahead of her appearance in the hotseat in the Senate chamber tomorrow, Arlene Foster's written statement has been published by the RHI Inquiry, external.
It runs to about 150 pages, so you may pour yourself a cup of tea and find a comfy chair before you settle down for a read of it.
Image source, PAIn it she says that none of the businesses getting RHI subsidy are on a register of donors to her party, the DUP.
She also says a decision by her former advisor Andrew Crawford to pass confidential departmental plans for cost controls to family members may well be a breach of several codes of ethics.
Returning from the afternoon break, Sir Patrick says Dr Crawford and Mrs Foster will have to appear before the inquiry again next week.
Other witnesses are already scheduled to appear then, but they'll have to be rescheduled.
Image source, RHI InquirySir Patrick says that given the confluence of Dr Crawford's and Mrs Foster's evidence and its "significant importance to the inquiry" the panel wants to hear them in close succession.
"There do come moments where it's more important to hear the evidence as a block," he adds.
It is Dr Crawford's "greatest regret in all of this" that he didn't read CEPA's technical report about the RHI scheme.
"If I did, clearly my advice to the minister would've been different and I've no doubt the minister would've had major questions to ask," he adds.
That's because the detail in the report was not accurately reflected in the related submission to the minister.
Dr Crawford says he didn't see it as his job to mark the "homework" of technical experts at CEPA, who were paid by DETI to draw up a report that laid the foundations for the RHI scheme.
CEPA was paid "a large amount of money" - about £100,000 - and he says they should therefore have provided a report that "should've been at a level that was clearly and easily understood" by the civil servants setting up the scheme.
Dr Crawford says he does not believe DETI officials took a copy of the technical report about the RHI scheme to the key meeting in June 2011 that resulted in the minister deciding to proceed with the initiative.
DETI's energy boss Fiona Hepper (below) has told the inquiry that she took a copy to the meeting and it was discussed by those present, who included Dr Crawford.
Image source, RHI InquirySir Patrick presses him about the meeting: "You do not know whether or not she brought a report from CEPA to you and the minister on 14 June?"
"I don't believe that report was brought to us in that meeting," responds the witness.
The design of the RHI scheme was based on a detailed technical report drawn up by an external energy consultancy firm, Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA).
The consultants were engaged by DETI to draw up the frame for the scheme, assessing what renewable heating technologies it would cover and making complex calculations about the subsidies that would be on offer.
A draft of that report was attached in the submission sent to the Mrs Foster and Dr Crawford before the minister made a decision to proceed with the initiative.
Image source, Getty ImagesBut Dr Crawford says it wasn't his job to read them and he claims that he and the minister "were always clear" that submissions from civil servants should "cover all of the relevant points" contained in reports.
If there was a technical report of hundreds of pages he "did not go through that in detail" because he wasn't an "expert in that area" and he "did not have time to do it".
That is at odds with what Mrs Foster has told the inquiry.
In her written statement, she says her adviser "would read the detail of technical reports", "draw particularly significant aspects of them to my specific attention" and advise her on them as she wouldn't have had the necessary expertise to draw her own conclusions from them.
The Post-Its that Dr Crawford put on submissions to the minister were a "removable record", says inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin, and because they were not kept "the world would not know" what points the adviser had raised to her.
He says that "from a public point of view, it is of considerable importance".
Image source, Getty ImagesMr Aiken questions why there was a need for the notes to be destroyed after the minister had seen them: "I'm trying to understand what the fear is."
Dr Crawford says there was no fear and it was simply the system used by him and Mrs Foster.
When a submission came from DETI officials for the minister, Dr Crawford would read it and either pass it on for Mrs Foster's for approval or send it back to officials with points that needed to be addressed.
In his witness statement, Dr Crawford says if there was any "political advice" he wished to give the minister about the submission he would "make a note on a Post-It note" and attach that to the document.
Image source, Getty ImagesThe Post-Its were not kept, Dr Crawford tells the inquiry, but he says the matters covered on them were political "with a small p".
Mr Aiken observes that whatever was written on the Post-It would form part in the minster's decision making, but the witness says the matter is being "over-complicated too much".
Mr Aiken offers the example of a meeting at which officials would be writing in notebooks.
Mr Crawford may also have been writing on his copy of an official submission to the minister or on a piece of paper, and the minister may have been doing the same.
Image source, Getty ImagesThe June 2011 meeting that was discussed before lunch is one example "where none of that paper exists, other than the submission", says Mr Aiken.
Dr Crawford says he assumed that notes would have been going into the civil service's document library system.
Some of what Dr Crawford has seen emerging in the inquiry "quite frankly shocks me" and there are "many lessons that I would learn" from it.
Mr Aiken asks him if it's "a healthy position for transparent and accountable government" for meetings between ministers and civil servants not to be minuted.
Image source, RHI InquiryDr Crawford says he has "no difficulty" in saying that records of meetings should be made.
There are things he "would do differently" if he was ever to work as an adviser again.
Image source, RHI InquiryThe inquiry resumes after the lunchbreak, with more questions for Dr Crawford about the minuting of meetings.
Image source, Getty ImagesSir Patrick calls for the lunch break and we'll be back at 14:00 for more from Dr Crawford.
Pieces of the RHI debacle jigsaw are missing because there is no record of some key meetings - some involving the then DETI minister Mrs Foster and her officials.
One such meeting was on 14 June 2011, when the important decision was taken on what model to choose for the RHI scheme.
Dr Crawford says he can't remember a single meeting in his 10 years as an adviser at which notes were not taken and he insists that a civil servant took a note at the meeting in question.
Image source, Getty ImagesThe inquiry has heard from former DETI energy boss Fiona Hepper and former DETI permanent secretary David Sterling that the practice of note-taking at meetings was stopped at one point.
When presented with that, Dr Crawford says there was no change in the note-taking process "in my entire time in the civil service".
He also says he wasn't aware that there was a habit of not recording meetings until he heard the evidence suggesting that in this inquiry, but chair Sir Patrick Coghlin point out Dr Crawford should've been aware that other reports had been critical of DETI about its lack of records even before the RHI scheme.
It would've been rare for Mrs Foster to reject the advice from her DETI officials when she was deciding on a policy matter says Dr Crawford.
A key question for the inquiry is why the particular model for the RHI scheme was chosen by the minister when at least one other option offered far better value for money.
Dr Crawford says that neither he or Mrs Foster had the technical experience "to assess whether the advice that was coming up was right or wrong".
Image source, Getty Images"If an officials was saying we believe you should take this decision for the following reason, nine times out of 10 or maybe more than that the minister would've accepted that advice."
He adds that while the RHI scheme is a big issue now, at the time it was being created it "wasn't even the largest issue in the [department's] energy division", and says that he and Mrs Foster "weren't as focused on it then as we could've been".
"because of that we were accepting advice that was coming up from officials."
The Department for Energy and Climate change (DECC) was the Whitehall department responsible for running the Great Britain RHI scheme.
Its then minster Greg Barker - now Lord Barker of Battle - (below) wrote to DETI several times to update it on important developments and changes that were in the pipeline for the GB scheme.
Sometimes he would get a reply but "sometimes he wouldn't get so much as a thank-you note", says Mr Aiken.
Dr Crawford says this should not have been normal practice - it would have been "common courtesy" to reply to letters.
"I'm near enough sure that the minister would not have been aware, or I wasn't aware, that those letters came in in the first place," he says.
Mr Aiken says "a lot of important information about why the GB RHI scheme was changing was contained in that correspondence, to which minister Barker never got a reply".
He says that if Dr Crawford's suggestion is that he and Mrs Foster didn't actually see the letters from Mr Barker, the inquiry needs to find out why.
Sir Patrick asks for clarification about Dr Crawford's comments about the importation of legislation from Westminster.
"Was it an assumption that 'this will be difficult because it came from GB'?" he asks.
The witness says that unionists needed a "clear rationale" to explain why something should be done by GB and not devolved to Stormont, adding: "It's down to the politics of it."
Image source, RHI InquirySir Patrick observes that with the RHI scheme a decision was taken at Stormont not to be a part of a similar scheme in Great Britain.
There were also decisions taken not to adopt parts of the GB model even though warnings were given.
The inquiry has heard suggestions that the RHI debacle may never have happened if Stormont officials had simply copied the existing GB scheme.
Dr Crawford says: "It didn't come into our thinking because a lot of those warnings remained with officials and weren't brought to the attention to the minister."
Asked about his working relationship with Arlene Foster, Dr Crawford says it was "very good" and the "fact I was with her for so long stands testament to that".
He worked alongside her over several years in her time leading the Department of the Environment, DETI and the Department of Finance and Personnel.
Image source, EPA"We knew how each other operated - I knew how she made decisions," he adds.
Outlining the demands on them at DETI, he says the portfolio "covered a very wide range of issues" and the economic downturn at the time made their jobs all the more difficult.
Dr Crawford would've been with the minister throughout the working week and even accompanied her on overseas trade missions related to her role.
Inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin asks whether there would've been a "resentment" on behalf of some Stormont parties about incorporating UK government policies in Northern Ireland, "simply because it came from a piece of GB legislation".
Dr Crawford says that he can't remember if that was the case in the RHI scheme but "in some cases yes".
Image source, RHI InquiryHe points to the nationalist parties, Sinn Féin and the SDLP - "I won't stick it to one; it could be either" - and says they would "probably be reluctant in having a UK-wide approach where [the issue] could be devolved to Northern Ireland".
It's fair to say that Sir Patrick appears somewhat astonished.