Why isn’t Andy Burnham’s GMCA answering questions about Sacha Lord?

By Joshi Herrmann

Andy Burnham and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority are refusing to answer questions about their response to serious allegations about the mayor’s nighttime economy advisor Sacha Lord, as new details emerge about the story. Lord’s lawyers threatened The Mill with a lawsuit yesterday, and the Manchester Evening News has declined to comment on why it didn’t investigate a tip off it was given about the story in late 2022.

On Thursday, we revealed that a company controlled by Lord had obtained more than £400,000 of public money from an Arts Council scheme that was supposed to support culturally significant organisations during the pandemic. Our story presented evidence that the application was deeply misleading and that Lord’s company Primary Security had recently changed its name to Primary Events. The application claimed that the company was “the backbone of the national creative events sector” and that it provided a wide range of services, whereas former staff and the company’s former director say that it was purely a security company.

Today we can reveal that in an application to Manchester City Council in December 2020, around a month before the Arts Council application was made, the company described itself as a security company. Answering the question "What is the nature of your business", the application to the council responds: "Security Company" and clarifies: "Primary Security Ltd provides security for a wide range of hospitality venues in Greater Manchester”. The company subsequently received Additional Restrictions Grants from the council totalling £11,003, with an additional £5,600 for a different grant in 2021.

We asked Lord about this discrepancy between how the company was portraying itself to the Arts Council and to the local authority. A spokesperson for Lord told us the funding questionnaire requested “the company name as detailed on the business rates bills” and added that we should not conflate the Arts Council application and the council one. “These are two separate Applications with two separate criteria, two separate time frames, and two completely separate organisations,” the spokesperson said.

A legal threat

Late yesterday afternoon, lawyers representing Lord sent The Mill a letter threatening legal action for defamation. The letter demands that the story we published on Thursday is taken down by Tuesday and that we should apologise to Lord for publishing it. But they have provided no evidence that contradicts our reporting about the nature of Lord’s company, and The Mill has informed Lord’s lawyers that our work on this story is strongly in the public interest and will continue.

Lord’s lawyers say that Primary Event Solutions was indeed more than a security company when it applied for Arts Council funding in January 2021, claiming that the company also supplied “bar staff, events supervisors, event managers, marketing, artist liaison and ticketing.” That is a notably more modest list of services than what was claimed in the Arts Council application, and despite repeated requests to Lord’s representatives this week, no evidence has been supplied to back up these claims.

It’s also unclear how the company could have built up any meaningful track record of providing these services before the application was made. Multiple former staff and directors have told us that the company was a security company going into the pandemic, at which point it lost most of its business. Between October 2020, when the company changed its name to Primary Event Solutions, and January 2021, when the Arts Council application was made, the country was operating under various stages of national lockdowns and regional tiered restrictions.

Refusing to comment

So far, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has refused to comment on how it is responding to the allegations against Lord, raising serious questions about transparency at the authority, where Lord works as an unpaid advisor to Burnham.

On Thursday, The Mill asked the GMCA the following questions:

• What is the status of the GMCA's investigation/checking into the allegation that your nighttime economy advisor fraudulently obtained more than £400,000 of taxpayers' money during the pandemic?

• Has the mayor been briefed on the allegations?

• Was the mayor aware before this week that Mr Lord had obtained this money from the Arts Council?

• If he was aware of it, did he ask questions about the legitimacy of a security company obtaining money that was meant for culturally significant organisations?

• Was the mayor aware that Mr Lord subsequently began winding up the company that had received the public money, only to create a new company doing similar things with a similar name?

• Will Mr Lord be continuing in his role advising the mayor?

At 11am yesterday morning, the GMCA’s Assistant Director Helen Grady, who is in charge of News and Media, replied without any answers to our questions or a statement. Grady wrote: “I confirm receipt of your questions below. Please see our previous statement. We have nothing further to add.”

Having twice attempted to call Grady and texted her a set of questions at lunchtime, at 3.30pm yesterday we emailed the GMCA again, asking for answers to our original questions plus a few more:

• Is the culture team at the GMCA looking into these claims, as we were told earlier this week?

• The GMCA has said publicly: "Greater Manchester recognises that its ways of working and formal governance need to support transparent and publicly accountable decision making. Effective Scrutiny is even more important in the light of the new powers that devolution brings." In light of that commitment, what is the scrutiny process that is now under way in relation to these allegations, and who is running it?

• Some readers will naturally conclude from your stonewalling tactics this week that the mayor is inappropriately covering up for his close friend and advisor by not investigating this or appointing an outside body or law firm to investigate. Is that true?

Half an hour later, a GMA spokesperson replied, again refusing to answer any of our questions. They wrote: “Thank you for your email. We refer you to our previous statement. We have nothing further to add.” We asked one more time for answers at 4.26pm, but have not received a response.

The Mill understands that several journalists from national newspapers have now also contacted the GMCA to ask about its stance on the allegations.

The missing story

One question surrounding the story is whether it could have emerged earlier. The Mill has learned that Mark Turnbull, Lord’s former business partner who ran Primary Security and was forced out by Lord in mid-2020, approached a reporter from the Manchester Evening in December 2022, asking her to investigate the Arts Council application.

Turnbull has shared with us an email chain in which he contacts the reporter on December 9, asking whether she is the right person to expose the story. After the reporter replies asking for more details, Turnbull sends his full document of evidence on December 14, a similar set of information that he shared with The Mill recently.

Turnbull says he never heard back from the reporter after that, suggesting the lead was never investigated. And despite publishing dozens of stories about Lords in the 18 months since, the MEN has never mentioned the allegations about Primary Security.

We asked Reach Plc, the London-based parent company of the MEN, why allegations that one of the city’s most influential public figures and a prominent advisor to the mayor were not investigated, but they told us they did not want to respond. They did say they were looking into other claims made by Mr Turnbull about the relationship between Lord’s companies and the newspaper, which we will return to next week when Reach has completed its checks.

Who guards the guardians?

Greater Manchester has led the way in recent years as more powers have been devolved to city regions. But this devolution of power has come with questions about how newly empowered figures like Burnham should be scrutinised and held to account, especially given the dramatic decline of local media.

Scrutiny has been considered a weak point of the mayoral system so far, with too much onus on committees of councillors who do not have the time or expertise to hold the combined authority to account. When Greater Manchester won a special “trailblazer” devolution deal last year, the government insisted on a raft of new measures to beef up the scrutiny of the GMCA, including a plan to pay councillors who sit on key scrutiny committees.

The GMCA has recognised publicly that “Effective Scrutiny is even more important in the light of the new powers that devolution brings” and says it is committed to “transparent and publicly accountable decision-making”.

The Mill has been told two councillors on the Overview and Scrutiny Committee wrote to GMCA officials yesterday to ask how they are investigating the allegations against Lord and whether the matter has been referred to Greater Manchester Police. The composition of new scrutiny committees for the coming year is expected to be decided at meetings next week, after which councillors could raise the matter formally.

All eyes are now on Burnham. He has had few genuine crises since he took office as mayor and was re-elected for a third term comfortably earlier this month. But from the beginning, he has presented himself as a figure of integrity who left national politics because he was tired of the sordid “way of Westminster”. If he believes his close advisor and good friend Lord has been wrongly accused, he will soon need to explain why he thinks so, and what process was undertaken to reach that conclusion.

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If you know more about this story, please get in touch. You can share the story on X here or on Instagram here. If you haven’t read the full story yet, click below, including the full details of what Lord is accused of and an interview with his former business partner. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” he told us about seeing the Arts Council application. “I just couldn’t believe it.”