Renewable Heat Incentive Inquiry examining botched energy scheme
Former DETI energy boss John Mills returns to answer inquiry questions
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, RHI InquiryMr Scoffield asks the witness if he has any ideas on how the civil service HR system could be made to work better.
Mr Mills says the HR function "needs to regard itself as a service to people like me rather than a master of people like me".
And he says there should be targets regarding how fast HR can fill vacancies.
The civil service has a "habit of punishing good behaviour and of rewarding bad behaviour", according to Mr Mills.
Mr Hutchinson "knocks his pan in for four years doing the RHI, carrying an incredible burden", he says, and may have considered it was harming his career prospects.
Image source, RHI InquiryIt seems to Mr Mills that it was "reasonable to allow him" an exit from the department.
He says DETI's human resources team told him that he had to let Mr Hutchinson go.
Inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin says he cannot understand why the civil service system prohibited the retention of Mr Hutchinson to help his successor at DETI.
Mr Hutchinson moved to Stormont's Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) and Sir Patrick asks whether a request was made to that department to allow him to return for two weeks to help his successor understand "this very complicated, very difficult risky" RHI scheme.
Mr Mills says he had agreed that there would be a handover but that if Mr Hutchinson had stayed OFMDFM would have passed him over for the second candidate on their list.
Image source, Getty Images"Is that seriously the way the Northern Ireland civil service works in practical terms?" asks Sir Patrick.
Mr Mills responds saying: "Had the risks Peter highlighted in his handover note been more apparent early I would have said: 'Sorry you can’t go we have to fix this.'"
He also says that Joanne McCutcheon, who was part of DETI's core team working on the RHI scheme, and others should have refused his request to leave.
Mr Mills makes the point that it was important to pick people who were suitable to fill vacant roles.
But Dr MacLean (above) takes him up on that point, arguing that Mr Mills has placed more weight on getting people with policy and legislation experience rather than staff with experience in energy and renewables.
Mr Mills says he couldn't get someone with a degree in renewable heat and all there was on offer was people with policy and legislation experience.
He felt many of the positions were "daunting".
His decision to let Mr Hutchinson leave is particularly under the microscope, since he did have relevant expertise in energy and renewables.
One of the officials from the team of two staff working on the RHI scheme from the outset - Joanne McCutcheon - was allowed to go on a career break at the end of April 2014.
Her colleague Peter Hutchinson (below) left the department in May that year.
Those departures left a severe knowledge gap in the team running the scheme, which has been reflected in evidence given by several witnesses so far.
Image source, RHI InquiryAasks whether the this should've been allowed to happen, Mr Mills says: "In hindsight, clearly not."
It was suggested that Mr Hutchinson should be allowed to act up in Ms McCutcheon's role but Mr Mills rejected that because he believed other people should be given a chance to apply.
Mr Mills ultimately amended his assessment statement, removing the criticism of DETI's finance officials.
He says he agreed to do that "at the behest" of the finance team.
Image source, Getty ImagesDame Una tells him that the purpose of the statement is not to tell the department's permanent secretary "that everything is all right".
"You were trying to raise issues that were relevant to the [permanent secretary's] responsibility," she tells him, and asks why he was persuaded to remove the criticism when he was "reasonably trying to raise" it.
He says he was "persuaded that there was a less pejorative way of writing it" and he belied the change in wording still flagged the problem but in less "potentially inflammatory" terms.
In an assessment statement of his team's workload in May 2015 - a document that would ultimately go to the DETI's permanent secretary - Mr Mills originally outlined the need for extra staff to work on the RHI scheme.
He also complained that in spite of "repeated requests" the department's finance officials had not given the energy team clarity about the maximum budget that would be for the initiative.
Looking back on that now, Mr Mills says he had "more courage than I thought" when he was writing that.
Image source, RHI InquiryDr MacLean questions if that need for bravery reflects a difficulty for a civil servant to raise matters like that in writing.
"It can be quite difficult to attack your direct line manager," says Mr Mills.
"If I put something on paper I'm really complaining about my line manager's not supporting the need for extra resources," he adds.
The witness says its likely not so much a matter of courage on his part but "it's probably a matter of me being quite cross".
Asked if there was a "leaking" of staff from DETI, Mr Mills says the department was "good at losing staff, but not so good at replacing them".
He details how, for various reasons, many had moved on from the department.
Image source, RHI Inquiry"Because it is policy and legislative work, you can get people who are completely unsuited to the job," he explains.
"The risk then is that you get the next person on the conveyor belt, but there wasn't even a conveyor belt then."
His focus in early 2014, he says, was on sorting out these staffing issues but by early 2015 that switched to "plugging gaps" in the RHI scheme team, leaving gaps elsewhere.
Inquiry counsel Mr Scoffield asks if DETI's energy team was a part of the department "that people wanted out of", given the pressures it was facing.
The three staff who'd been working on the RHI scheme since its birth all left the team within a few months of each other between late-2013 and spring 2014.
Image source, Getty ImagesMr Mills says it's an "unfair characterisation" to say people wanted to get away.
Those who remained in the team had "quite a strong ethos... of being able to cope with whatever was thrown at the division".
There are 30 people at DETI working on the RHI scheme now even though the initiative has been closed to new applicants since early-2016, says Mr Mills.
When it was being set up and for much of the time it was operating, there was just two - one full-time, one part-time.
Image source, RHI InquiryMr Mills says he felt "betrayed" by senior officials in the department who he felt had assured him there would be no reduction in energy team posts in the event that "the shutters came down" and there were cutbacks.
Ultimately he took a member of staff from DETIs electricity branch and moved them across to the renewable heat team.
Fiona Hepper, who was Mr Mills' predecessor in heading DETI's energy team,told the inquiry in Decemberthat the resources she had were "adequate but not optimum".
The witness disagrees, saying they were "clearly inadequate", especially in relation to the RHI scheme.
He says he "sought additional resources" on a number of occasions and succeeded in obtaining a few extra staff for the RHI scheme.
Inquiry panellist Dame Una O'Brien (below) is interested in whether the senior managers or department officials were doing their job properly and realising the resource pressure the team was under.
Image source, RHI InquiryMr Mills says he had regular conversations about resources but that due to financial constraints it led to a cutback on posts.
He admits that at no point did he ask for "another 10 people on RHI" and he "failed to appreciate the risk of the lack of resources on RHI".
"The fact that we couldn't get two staff officers and an [accounting officer] didn't give me much confidence that extra resources would be forthcoming."
In his witness statement, Mr Mills says the workload in running DETI's energy team was "extremely onerous, with ever increasing demands on my time" and there was a "sea of potential risks".
"There were multiple issues to be dealt with - for the most part all of them were described as urgent," he added.
He also said that the team had over-committed itself and he had to take the axe to some proposed projects.
Image source, Getty ImagesAsked if the team was under-resourced, Mr Mills says it was and its responsibilities should've been divided up between other parts of the department.
"It should have split between one in renewables and dealing with the markets - this happened roughly after I left," he adds.
He says the RHI scheme was the "worst example" of the team's insufficient resources.
The UK government department running the Great Britain RHI scheme was the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
Its then minister Greg Barker sent regular updates to DETI about developments - letters in November 2013, March, June and October 2014 all made mention of updates to its cost control plans - but he didn't always get a reply.
Image source, Getty Images"Do you think if greater attention had been paid to the response from DECC would that have caused greater reflection about whether Northern Ireland was falling behind Great Britain?" asks Mr Scoffield.
Mr Mills says "it certainly wouldn't have done any harm".
Image source, Getty ImagesThe "basic problem" that DETI's energy team had was that it didn't have the time "to have more than surface-level discussions with people" about the best ways to run its projects.
He says the breadth of the portfolio - there were about 12 issues falling under the team's responsibility, whereas other teams only dealt with four or five - meant it was difficult to get into depth on some topics.
"I can deal with complex issues as a generalist, I can deal with several... but 12 not so much," he explains.
Sir Patrick says he wants to understand how Mr Mills and DETI officials had not acted on warnings from he RHI scheme administrator Ofgem, sent in letters, about the issue of cost controls.
Inquiry panellist Dr Keith MacLean says it seems Mr Mills was just looking through the correspondence to see if there was anything he needed to do and breathing a sigh of relief if there was nothing that required action.
Image source, RHI InquiryMr Mills says his day-to-day work was "reactive", adding: "If the list got on to two pages things were bad and if it stayed on one page we were managing."
He says it is the "tyranny of the urgent over the important".
Dr MacLean says there was no "helicopter view" of the overall department.
DETI planned to introduce another important cost control mechanism - degression - to the RHI scheme in 2015 but, as Mr Mills says in his witness statement, problems with the scheme cropped up in the spring of that year and it was set to the side.
Degression is a trigger that kicks in to divide up the available pot of subsidy among an increasing number of applicants.
Mr Mills says staffing resources "were extremely limited", making it difficult for DETI's energy team to do any planning work for the introduction of degression to the scheme.
He says it was really only in spring 2015 that he looked at the legislation of the similar RHI scheme that was running in Great Britain that he "realised how far behind we were".
Image source, RHI InquiryMr Mills is being pushed now on his decision not to introduce cost controls to the RHI scheme.
Sir Patrick (above) is being particularly critical, saying that the result of Mr Mills' decisions was "no cost control".
The witness makes the point that this was a decision that had been made previously, but one he "failed to correct".
"Without cost control you have two schemes happily paying out public money," says Sir Patrick.
"That's absolutely correct," says Mr Mills in response.
The inquiry has heard that a decision was taken within DETI to prioritise the introduction of the domestic RHI scheme over the need to add cost controls to the original one for non-domestic users.
It had been put to the public in a consultation that cost controls would be introduced to both schemes at the same time but that ultimately didn't happen when the domestic scheme was given higher priority.
Image source, Getty ImagesThe cost control issue dropped off DETI's radar, meaning neither scheme had a budget protection measure.
Inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coglhin presses to find out why that decision wasn't left for a minister to take.
Mr Mills insists, as he has done before, that he believed the decision had been taken by someone before he joined DETI in January 2014.
Senior counsel David Scoffield (below) begins his questioning of Mr Mills, focusing on the domestic RHI scheme.
He asks why the introduction of the domestic scheme was delayed - it was originally planned to be introduced in 2013 but only opened the following year.
Mr Mills lists some of the jobs that had to be completed before the scheme was opened, such as developing a business case, hiring extra staff and meeting regulatory standards.
Image source, RHI Inquiry"There was a lack of realistic planning and methodology and a desire to meet whatever was the last deadline that was promised to the minister," says Mr Mills.
He adds that the changeover of staff would have been an issue too.
"There was a vagueness in planning," he says.
John Mills managed the energy team at Stormont's Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) DETI - which was responsible for the RHI scheme.
His time in the post began in January 2014 and continued through a key period when a range of things went badly wrong with the initiative.
Image source, RHI InquiryHe has more than 30 years of experience in the civil service, having served in the Department of Justice, the Department for Regional Development and now at the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, which he joined after leaving DETI in May 2016.
Mr Mills first appeared before the inquiry across two days in March and you can find his full written statement on the inquiry's website, external.