Professor Nick Hardwick:

We did not have a relationship with the board as such. Our relationship was with the chairman and the director and we met many staff members. I felt we had a cordial relationship. It was conducted on friendly terms. If one rereads the correspondence and the memorandum it was all conducted in a friendly way. After the report was completed we realised that they were not happy with some of what we said and we had two very lengthy meetings with them to discuss the report. On each occasion I was looking at the emails we had sent each other and we thought that we had resolved it and sorted it out. We are genuinely really saddened that is has come to this pass. We do not want to be sitting in this position. We had a cordial relationship and we thought we had a mutually supportive and constructive relationship while the review was ongoing.