A government official said the energy department did not procure the services and the process complied with all Whitehall rules.
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LONDON — The U.K. government last year awarded contracts worth more than £70,000 to a company headed by the brother of the energy department’s most senior civil servant. 
Three contracts were awarded to Amelio Enterprises to install solar panels on schools, according to documents acquired under a Freedom of Information request. 
The procurement process was led by the Crown Commercial Services, an agency inside the Cabinet Office. The funding for each school, announced by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in September 2025, was provided by the government’s publicly-owned clean energy company Great British Energy (GBE).
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.”
They added: “Amelio Solar Enterprises had already built a strong track record delivering solar projects for schools and had secured similar work for several years before Good Energy acquired the business.”
The contracts awarded to Amelio Solar were part of the latest tranche of GBE funding to install solar panels on schools and hospitals across the U.K., in a bid to bring down energy bills in public buildings. DESNZ argues this will free up cash to be invested back into education and the NHS.
Announcing the grants in September, Miliband said the funding would help schools and hospitals “save money on its bills, to be reinvested into the frontline, from textbooks to teachers to medical equipment.”
In the case of the contracts with Amelio Solar, a separate company was appointed to manufacture the solar panels used. 
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