GBE — which is funded by DESNZ and of which Ed Miliband, in his role as energy secretary, is the sole shareholder — has a budget of £8.3 billion to spend on clean power projects, including nuclear.
Amelio Enterprises was bought by the renewables company Good Energy Group — headed by chief executive Nigel Pocklington — in October 2024. At the time the contracts were awarded, his brother, Jeremy Pocklington, was permanent secretary at DESNZ.
Pocklington was the top official at DESNZ between February 2023 and November 2025, when he left the department to become permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence.
He declared his brother’s position at Good Energy on his register of interests. The register stated that he would “recuse himself from any direct engagement with Good Energy” as permanent secretary at DESNZ, with any engagement “delegated to a director general.”
DESNZ did not comment on the record about the procurement process. An official from the Department for Education said the contracts, issued under government plans to fund the roll out of solar panels on schools and hospitals, had complied with U.K. procurement rules.
A spokesperson for Good Energy said: “We strongly reject any suggestion of a conflict of interest in this contract. The work was awarded following an open, competitive tender process and assessed against the same objective criteria applied to all suppliers.”