Drax insiders privately raised concerns over its sustainability claims, court papers show | Drax

Top executives at Drax raised concerns internally about the validity of the energy company’s sustainability claims, while publicly denying allegations that it was cutting down environmentally important forests to produce fuel, court documents revealed.

Britain’s biggest power station has assured ministers and civil servants of the company’s green credentials as it scrambles to defend itself against allegations in a BBC Panorama documentary that it burned wood from “ancient” forests in Canada.

Senior executives at the company, including its chief executive, publicly denied the allegations, but other executives at the North Yorkshire factory privately raised concerns that it did not have sufficient evidence to support sustainability claims, according to evidence submitted to an employment tribunal involving its former chief lobbyist.

Drax owners received more than £7 billion in subsidies taken from household energy bills, provided the biomass pellets were made from waste or low-value wood from sustainable forests.

However, the company faces repeated skepticism about the sustainability of its business model, which involves importing millions of tonnes of wood pellets across the Atlantic each year.

Drax denied the findings of the BBC documentary, which aired in October 2022. The show focused on two pellet production sites in British Columbia, and the company accused the broadcaster of repeating “inaccurate claims about biomass” from “ill-informed” critics.

In the days following the broadcast, the company’s chief executive, Will Gardiner, responded to a letter from Jacob Rees-Mogg, then the energy secretary, which raised questions about the documentary’s findings. He assured the government that Drax was meeting its grant requirements. A senior politician offered similar assurances to civil servants.

Gardiner wrote: “I have placed sustainably sourced biomass at the heart of Drax. This requires careful and robust governance and traceability.”

However, court documents provided to several news outlets, including the Guardian, have raised further questions over whether assurances given by Drax to ministers, civil servants and industry regulator Ofgem after the broadcast could be justified at the time.

Drax responded to the BBC documentary by claiming that 80% of the materials used to make its biomass pellets were sawmill residues – “sawdust, wood chips and bark left behind when processing wood” – and the rest was waste.

The Guardian revealed last year that forestry experts believed the company had continued, as recently as last summer, to source 250-year-old trees from some of Canada’s oldest forests via the Burns Lake pellet mill.

Rowaa Ahmar, the company’s former public affairs manager, sued Drax, alleging she was fired after writing to Gardiner in the weeks after the broadcast warning him that the company was “misleading the public, the government and its regulator” about the sustainability of imported pellets.

Ahmar testified in court that the BBC’s allegations against Drax unleashed a “level of chaos I have never seen before”, and that his work following the documentary’s revelations demonstrated that the allegations “were correct and that Drax had misled the public, the government and its regulator”.

His witness statement claims that Drax’s compliance manager admitted in an email to colleagues in the days following the broadcast that the company may have been burning old growth pellets from Meadowbank and Burns Lake “consistently” at its North Yorkshire factory since “at least 2019”.

The compliance officer warned that, if true, Drax would have committed “material misrepresentation of burn data” under government grant programs, according to Ahmar’s witness statement.

Ahmar’s statement claims that in the weeks that followed, the compliance officer explained in an in-person meeting with Ahmar that Drax did not have enough data to prove the exact origin of all of its wood pellets, meaning the company could not prove that its biomass was sustainable and legal according to government requirements.

Paul Sheffield, the company’s commercial director, said he was also aware of these concerns. He said in a witness statement that he knew the compliance officer “had some concerns about our ability to fully prove the points we were making around Panorama” and that those concerns were later expressed. raised with the Drax executive committee.

Further concerns were raised in an online meeting between Ahmar and a second member of the company’s compliance team, according to Ahmar’s statement, in which the staff member explained that Drax had not measured every log used for biomass sustainability but that “we represent to Ofgem that we do”. Court documents do not suggest that Gardiner was aware of the concerns raised by some Drax executives when he first denied the BBC’s allegations.

Gardiner said in his witness statement that he was informed by his corporate affairs manager before the broadcast that it “would not have any significant impact or fallout”, but that after the revelations the company called “a crisis meeting” as it faced questions “both within Drax and externally”.

His statement said the team in the UK “dealing with the fallout” was “not well connected with the team on the ground in Canada”, meaning it had been a “challenge” to gather all the information needed to respond in a public statement and to the government.

“From the outset of our response to the Panorama program, it became clear to me that we needed to conduct a full review of the allegations made,” Gardiner said. His statement denied Ahmar’s suggestion that he had resisted scrutiny for fear of what it might reveal.

In a witness statement, Jonathan Oates, director of external affairs at Drax, said the aim after the BBC documentary was “to disseminate correct information to refute” the allegations. “The number one rule of public relations is don’t lie,” Oates said.

Clare Harbord, the company’s former director of corporate affairs, told the court that all external statements made by the company had been “signed by many people within the company” and that “the amount of cross-checking was extraordinary, meticulous and robust”.

Consultancy KPMG was tasked with reviewing data provided by Drax to the regulator and public statements made after the broadcast, almost a month after the allegations emerged. Drax declined to make the review’s findings public.

Ahmar left Drax in January 2024 after a period of “special leave” from his role. She reached a settlement with the company over the employment tribunal complaint filed last year. Drax said the company and Ahmar had “reached a mutually acceptable position, without admitting liability.”

A Drax spokesperson said the claims made against the company in court had been “thoroughly and seriously investigated through our internal processes, an independent report from a leading employment KC and separate third party reports into our biomass sourcing”.

The spokesperson added: “We have provided all relevant material from this investigation to our regulator, Ofgem. Following their separate investigation, which concluded in August 2024, Ofgem concluded that they found no evidence that we had received any information. [subsidies] incorrectly or that our biomass does not reach the sustainability threshold set by the government. Ofgem also found no evidence of deliberate misrepresentation.

Ofgem’s 16-month investigation, which was not focused on the provision of subsidies to Drax, found there had been “an absence of data governance and adequate controls in place” when it came to profiling the sources of timber used by the company from Canada between April 2021 and the end of March 2022. Drax agreed to pay £25 million in compensation for the breach.

A separate investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority continues. She is investigating “historical statements” made by Drax about the pellet supply.

Drax – which produced 10% of Britain’s electricity in 2024 – was once Western Europe’s largest coal-fired power station, but committed to replacing coal with compressed wood biomass pellets in 2012 and completed the switch in 2023.