Co-conspirators may remember when the Mail on Sunday revealed that Lord Deben, Chairman of the independent Climate Change Committee, took more than £600,000 from ‘green’ businesses into his family company, Sancroft International. Lesson learnt, you’d have thought. Maybe not…

Deben’s latest addition to the House of Lords’ register of interests shows ‘Greencoat Capital Ltd’ is a client of Sancroft. Greencoat Capital (now Schroders Greencoat) happen to describe themselves as “a specialist manager dedicated to the renewable energy infrastructure sector.”

Apparently Sancroft is only advising them on “sustainability“, so it’s all above board. Surely not a conflict of interest for their chairman, who also still happens to be Chairman of the Climate Change Committee… 

During his appointment hearing for the chairmanship, Deben said of his role with Sancroft:

“…almost everything that it does has no connection with the Committee on Climate Change, but there was one thing that I felt we ought to disengage from, and I said that. In that business [Sancroft], no one identified anything that they thought was a conflict.”

Admittedly that was ten years ago, though…