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Breaking: Sacha Lord has resigned as an advisor to Andy Burnham

Illustration: Jake Greenhalgh.

The Arts Council wants his company Primary Events to pay back the taxpayers’ money it obtained during the pandemic

Sacha Lord has resigned as an advisor to Andy Burnham after the Arts Council asked his company to repay over £400,000 of public money that it received during the pandemic.

Lord has always maintained that his company Primary Event Solutions obtained the money properly and last year threatened to sue The Mill for defamation when we revealed that the firm misled the Arts Council in its application for funding.

But this morning, the Arts Council announced that it had concluded its investigation into Lord’s company and that it wants the money back. A spokesperson said: “Following a thorough review of the application that Primary Event Solutions submitted to the Culture Recovery Fund in 2021, our decision is to withdraw the grant that was awarded and we are seeking to recover this money.” 

Burnham says that he accepted Lord’s resignation as Greater Manchester’s nighttime economy advisor last night, but said he did so “with regret” and that he didn’t understand the Arts Council’s conclusion.

Sacha Lord. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

Burnham said in a statement this morning: “Sacha has accepted there were inaccuracies in a grant application, and I believe him when he says there was no intention to mislead and that he made no personal gain from the grant. Given that the Arts Council’s Counter Fraud team previously found no misuse of public money, it is not clear to me why the Arts Council has now reached this decision.”

The Arts Council says that its decision is based on new information sent to it since it opened an investigation in May last year following our reporting, information they did not have when conducting their original investigation into the grant in 2022, when an allegation of fraud was filed relating to the application. A spokesperson told us: “We take our role as custodians of public money very seriously and have processes in place to assess applications. If concerns are raised to us about a grant application or award, we investigate and take the appropriate action.” 

In a statement today, Lord said he has been gradually stepping back from his role at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority in recent months. He said: “With heartfelt thanks to the Mayor and his team, I have decided to continue in this direction and embrace a new chapter ahead – championing the sector on a national level with fresh focus and energy.”

About the Arts Council’s finding, Lord said: “The company and its former directors have continued to work closely with Arts Council England to evidence that grant funds were used appropriately to support staff wages and company stability during the pandemic.”

Andy Burnham with Sacha Lord on the day of Burnham's election victory last year. Photo: @nightmayor2024.

The statement goes on: “Given the company’s current status in liquidation, and recognising that there are a small number of unintended oversights which have impacted the application’s clarity under the criteria, we accept that the grant status has been updated. That said, I remain concerned over inconsistencies and a lack of proportionality in the handling of this matter.”

It's unclear whether the public money will be repaid given that Primary Event Solutions entered liquidation in September 2023 with almost 100,000 of monies owed to the government in the form of unpaid VAT and a government-backed “bounce-back loan”. Lord had founded a business with a similar name and function called Primary Events Manchester in 2022.

You can find Lord’s statement in full here, along with statements from Burnham and the Arts Council.

Last May we published an investigation into Primary Event Solutions. The company, of which 30% was owned by Lord, had filed a grant application to Art Council England’s Covid Recovery Fund in 2021. Our reporting found that the application was riddled with spurious and misleading statements about what Primary Event Solutions — previously called Primary Security — actually did. 

Despite one of the company’s former directors and multiple staff only ever remembering the company offering security services, as it had since 2009, its grant application painted a picture of a company that was the backbone of the events sector. It claimed to provide not just security but “event coordinators, managers, production managers, assistants, technicians, sound engineers, lighting engineers, AV, bar staff, security staff, merchandise, cleaners and more for a huge number of the most respected and loved cultural events in the UK”. 

Illustration: Jake Greenhalgh.

Nevertheless, Arts Council England granted the company £401,928. When we obtained the assessment document the Arts Council used to evaluate how worthy of support the company was, we found that the body took many of the application’s most easily falsifiable claims at face value. 

For example, the assessors accepted the company’s claim that it generated £41 million of economic benefits for Greater Manchester, citing GMCA figures. When we approached the GMCA about this, it said it didn’t recognise the figure and that it hadn’t been pulled from GMCA data.

Following our first series of stories in May, Lord threatened to sue us for defamation. But after launching a “community fact check” in which Mill readers assisted us with our reporting, we found more evidence that the application was misleading, and Lord withdrew the threat.

In a statement at the time, he said: "The Mill made a series of extremely serious allegations against me personally. The Mill has alleged that Primary Event Solutions Limited deliberately lied in its Culture Recovery Fund application, that I am a dishonest person, and that I have misused public money. These allegations are all false and I reject them completely"

When we asked his representative today if the Lord still stood by that statement in light of Arts Council England’s conclusion, they didn’t respond to the question.

Editor’s note: To our members: thanks so much for your backing, which allows us to do this kind of work. If you’d like to support our journalism and allow us to do more stories like this, please join The Mill as a paying member. Our editor Joshi recently wrote about how we handled the legal threats from Lord, which you can read here.

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