Thanks to JNM for sharing the following response from the British Department of Energy and Climate Change to an inquiry he made regarding LENR. It does indicate that they are aware of what is going on.
“Thank you for your email, dated 30 March to the Prime Minister, about low-energy nuclear reactions. This Department’s position on low-energy nuclear reactions and the claims of Professor Rossi is to maintain a watching brief. Should the effect Professor Rossi describes transpire to be genuinely reproducible and to have a nature along the lines he describes, it would likely be the UK’s research councils, and not DECC, that would lead on development of skills and research in this area in the UK. However, given this, we feel that Professor Rossi’s experiments would be more credible if they could be independently verified (e.g. through experimentation that is peer reviewed). This would require the duplication of his experimental method and results by others, which is currently impossible, as he has not yet disclosed details of this to the scientific community. We understand that attempts by others to replicate his process, based on what information he has released have not yet yielded reproducible results and until such time as they can do so, we have no choice but to view his claims as unverifiable.
“I hope that this is helpful.
“Yours sincerely, DECC Correspondence Unit”