Dr McCormick has stated in his evidence that at the 8 June meeting the minister was told that urgent action was required to address the problems with the RHI scheme.

Mr Bell says he "can't address" this because "that level of detail would not have been for discussion at the issues meeting".

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Asked by Sir Patrick (above) asks whether Dr McCormick is right in his recollection, Mr Bell says "no".

Sir Patrick asks why a permanent secretary would say something that a minister would know is not true - Mr Bell says he doesn't know why and the inquiry chair makes a careful note.

Mr Bell was "completely unaware and hadn't been given any of the factual detail" about the problems with the RHI scheme in June 2015.

"None of that information, quite outrageously now, was given to the minister," he adds.

He was told by his adviser Tim Cairns that the matter was "being discussed" with other DUP advisers.

Mr Bell says: "I didn't know - and I think all the evidence shows I didn't know - at that stage that there were the concerns that existed."

In June 2015, Mr Bell attended his first meeting to discuss the big issues that DETI was dealing with and the RHI scheme was "on the agenda", he says.

But he claims that when it was raised his ministerial adviser said: "We're not dealing with this."

Mr Bell says that if he had been told at that meeting that the scheme had become unaffordable and there was no budget left for it, he would have "closed it to new entrants" there and then.

Image source, Getty Images

The inquiry barrister Mr Scoffield puts it to him that the ultimate closure of the scheme in February 2016 was a "widely unpopular move" with many MLAs lobbied about the "injustice" of it.

He asks if Mr Bell is therefore "seriously suggesting" that he would've moved immediately to shut the RHI down just a few weeks after he became a minister.

"Yes... as a minister I've never spent money that I didn't have," responds Mr Bell.

Mr Bell is asked if he can remember when he was first told that there was a difficulty with the RHI scheme's budget but "somewhere around the summer" of 2015 there was "a general view given".

The witness says he asked "quite detailed questions - 'What does this mean?' - and was told that there was no way that they could tell me".

Image source, RHI Inquiry

When pressed by the inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin, Mr Bell says he wasn't told that there was a deficit.

He can't be more precise as it was relayed to him in a conversation with the DETI permanent secretary Dr Andrew McCormick (above) rather than in a meeting or a written submission.

"The detail of it was vague to say the least," he adds.

On his appointment as DETI minister in May 2015, Mr Bell had a "vague awareness" of the RHI scheme, he tells the inquiry.

He says he wasn't told that it was an "urgent" issue or that it "immediately warranted" his attention.

By that point, civil servants had big concerns about the budget for the RHI scheme.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

It had been originally been estimated that about £12m would cover the cost of the scheme in the 2014-15 financial year but in reality that had almost doubled.

Mr Bell says it was his understanding that if anything under his watch was expected to run over its budget it would "be brought to by attention" in a formal manner.

"None of this occurred so my presumption - and I think it's a reasonable working presumption - was... that this was a scheme that was in hand, was being managed and was posing no current concerns."

Jonathan Bell was a Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MLA and the minister at Stormont's enterprise department during the period that the RHI scheme did the most damage to the public purse.

Hundreds of millions of pounds were committed when there was a sudden flood of applications in October and November 2015.

But in an explosive interview with the BBC's Stephen Nolan in December the next year, Mr Bell said he tried to close it down before that point, only to be thwarted by DUP advisers.

Image source, Pacemaker

He also accused the advisers of trying to alter documents "without my knowledge, without my consent".

The advisers have denied all of his claims.

He was suspended by his party and stood as an independent candidate in the subsequent Northern Ireland Assembly election in March 2016 but lost his seat, bringing his political career to an end.

Taking a Bible in both hands, Jonathan Bell takes an oath to say that he will tell the RHI Inquiry "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

This is his first appearance before the inquiry panel in Stormont's Senate chamber.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

He became the minister at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) in May 2015 and the range of questions he'll face from the inquiry's senior counsel David Scoffield QC will follow the 10 months or so that followed that.

Mr Bell has provided three written witness statements - you can find them here, external, here, external and here, external.

BBC News NI

A senior civil servant said that he does not "recall any resistance" from DUP advisers to the RHI scheme being placed on the agenda during ministerial meetings.

The former enterprise minister Jonathan Bell had made the claim in his witness statement, which was published this afternoon.

But Dr Andrew McCormick, the top civil servant in the department that ran the energy scheme, said he had no such memory of that ever happening.

"That's the kind of thing I would remember," he added.

BBC News NI

An independent inquiry into the RHI scandal was established in January last year by the then finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir.

He ordered it in the wake of the huge public concern and what was then a developing political crisis surrounding the scheme.

The RHI Inquiry began in November and Sir Patrick Coghlin (below), a retired Court of Appeal judge, is its chair and has been given full control over how it will operate.

Image source, Pacemaker

It will look at:

• the design and introduction of the RHI scheme
• the scheme's initial operation, administration, promotion and supervision
• the introduction of revised subsidies and a usage cap for new scheme claimants in 2015
• the scheme's closure

For more information on the RHI Inquiry, you can read our handy Q&A.

When the scale of the overspend emerged, public and political concern rocketed.

As the minister in charge of the Stormont department that set up the RHI scheme, the DUP leader Arlene Foster faced calls to resign from her role as Northern Ireland's first minister in December 2016.

Image source, PA

She resisted, and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness then quit as deputy first minister in protest at the DUP's handling of what had by then become a full-blown political crisis.

That move brought about the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive. Now, well beyond a year-and-a-half on from that, Northern Ireland remains without a devolved administration.

You can find much more detail on the RHI scheme in our need-to-know guide.

The budget of the RHI scheme ran out of control because of critical flaws in the way it was set up.

Claimants could effectively earn more money the more fuel they burned because the subsidies on offer for renewable fuels were far greater than the cost of the fuels themselves.

At one point the estimate for the overspend was set at £700m if permanent cost controls weren't introduced - temporary cuts have since pulled the budget back on track for now.

Whatever the scale of the bill, it will have to be picked up by the Northern Ireland taxpayer.

The Renewable Heat Incentive scheme - or RHI for short - came to the fore of the Northern Ireland public's knowledge in late-2016... and the fallout from the scandal attached to it is still being felt in the region's politics today.

Image source, Getty Images

The scheme was set up by the Northern Ireland Executive in 2012, as a way of encouraging businesses to switch from using fossil fuels to renewable sources for generating their heat.

Those who signed up were offered financial incentives to buy new heating systems and the fuel to run them.

It's the day that many people have been waiting for.

The Renewable Heat Incentive Inquiry has just returned this week from its summer break and it's got straight into the box office stuff.

Image source, AFP

Former Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) minister Jonathan Bell will tell his side of the story about the scandal that brought Stormont down today and tomorrow.

Proceedings begin shortly - we'll have a full live stream and text commentary of all of the best bits.