Dear Millers — ever since they took place, Andy Burnham and his former advisor Sacha Lord have hailed their 'United We Stream' fundraising events as a major success. Burnham said he “cannot begin to say” how pleased he was with United We Stream, his signature fundraising effort as mayor, and Lord has described the virtual DJ nights that allowed people to party at home during the pandemic as “one of the proudest moments of my career.”
And yet, for almost as long, we’ve been hearing something different about United We Stream: that it was an embarrassing fiasco. For at least three years now, we’ve been told that behind the scenes, things went badly wrong, including money not being paid to the charities and organisations that the public believed they had donated to.
Today, for the first time, we can start to reveal that story, based on documents and emails we have obtained. The documents raise serious questions about why large amounts of the public’s donations seem to have gone unaccounted for, and suggest a blurring of the boundaries that should separate a public body like the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and a private individual like Sacha Lord. If charitable funds were misused by the GMCA, that could constitute a criminal offence.
The documents obtained by The Mill show:
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