First the vice chancellor was suspended, now the chair of the board of governors is gone too

Dear readers — the turmoil at the University of Greater Manchester shows no sign of abating in 2026. The Mill has learned that William Morris, chair of the university’s board – in effect, the most influential person at the university - is standing down. The scandal over the university’s finances claims another senior figure. 

Mollie Simpson, whose investigative reporting has set off this whole saga and a major police investigation into the university, has the latest in today’s edition. 

This is one of four editions in consecutive days...

• Tomorrow, Ophira unspools a strange local mystery: who is the man haunting Manchester and Salford's businesses with accusatory graffiti?
• On Friday Lucy brings you our first ever Good News edition, full of inspiring people and amazing initiatives, as pledged to you in last year's Mill campaign
• And over the weekend Jack Dulhanty has a profile of Zoe Bread, the loaf-faced thorn in Manchester City Council's side.

That's all to come. But first, of course, your briefing.

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To learn more about Stoller Hall and its upcoming family concerts, Stoller Story Sounds and Big Band Bop, click the link below.

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🚆 The highly anticipated Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) plans have been revealed, and the government is setting aside £45bn to invest in a series of projects. Manchester will be getting a new line to Liverpool, although this won’t arrive until “phase two”, while phase one — focusing on Yorkshire — is expected to be completed in the somewhat vague timeline of “the 2030s”. The Liverpool line will run via Manchester airport and Warrington, leaving scope for a future connection to Birmingham. But again, don’t hold your breath, because if a Birmingham-Manchester line is on the horizon, work won’t start for that till around 2045. Manchester Airport is also getting a new station, which the group’s chief executive described as “long overdue”. 

The spectre of HS2 clearly haunts the government’s thinking, with a spending cap set at £45bn to avoid a repeat. After that, extra cash will need to be funded by local mayors themselves. Andy Burnham has welcomed the plans as a “significant step forward”, and said “we have a government with an ambitious vision for the North”. Although gripes remain: there is no firm commitment to an underground station at Piccadilly, one of Burnham’s key demands. 

🚗 A video showing a driver travelling at 112mph is forming part of the police investigation into the fatal head-on collision in Bolton last Sunday, which killed four people. It has since been reported by Metro that the vehicle was allegedly modified to increase its engine power. One local, Martin Jones, told The Mill that the accident didn’t come as a surprise to many residents. Jones believes driving standards slipped when traffic officers were reduced 10 to 15 years ago. He remembers a time when there were six traffic cars routinely covering Bolton — now he says there are none. Martin described an “endless” list of poor driving practices in the area, which has come to be known as “‘The Bolton Highway Code’” by locals. The daughter of one of the men killed - 54-year-old taxi driver Masrob Ali - described him as the “gentlest soul”. 

✈️ Despite repeatedly picking up gongs for being the UK’s worst airport, Manchester Airport has just recorded its busiest December on record. The month took the total number of flights for 2025 to 32 million — another record breaker — with many coming via the brand-new Terminal 2. That means those of us lucky enough to get away over Christmas were also lucky enough to get a first glimpse of the new Boutique Mall and a second World Duty Free store. Not bad for the worst of the worst. 

Another domino falls at the University of Greater Manchester 

By Mollie Simpson

A month ago, we reported a curious arrangement at the University of Greater Manchester. The university has been charged millions of pounds by an organisation called the Centre for Islamic Finance, one of whose directors is Baroness Morris, a Conservative member of the House of Lords. The centre appears to have no employees and is operating as a private company, but the main reason it looks odd is that Baroness Morris is married to the chair of the university’s board of governors, a former crown court judge in Bolton called William Morris, whose role means that he is effectively in charge of ensuring good governance.

One staff member described the arrangement as “a flagrant breach” of the university’s governance rules, and the local MP Phil Brickell said he found the arrangements “extremely worrying”. We reported that a member of the board had threatened not to sign off the university’s accounts until the payments to the Centre for Islamic Finance were explained. 

A month after our story was published, the university has confirmed that William Morris is stepping down from his position. It’s the latest major development in the university’s financial scandal, which last year saw the suspension of the longtime vice chancellor George Holmes and other senior officials and a police investigation looking into allegations of “fraud and bribery”, including raids on seven properties by GMP’s major incidents team

The Mill understands that Morris told governors of his intention to step down on Monday evening. At midday on Tuesday, the university’s acting vice chancellor Greg Walker informed staff via email that the university’s governing body would be undertaking an election to appoint a new chair. “We thank the outgoing chair, who assumed the role in 2020, for his service to the university,” Walker wrote.

Multiple sources have told us that Morris was once considered a member of Holmes’ inner circle. As chair, he signed off on accounts during a period when the university was paying millions to a small marketing company in Milton Keynes whose owner, Joseph Wheeler, was accused by staff of racist bullying and of not delivering value for money. It’s unclear how much Morris knew about that arrangement, and there is no evidence that he knew of plans by Wheeler - who was also given senior positions within the university - to divert hundreds of thousands of pounds in tuition fees to Wheeler’s private company.

As a member of the nominations, remuneration and resources committees, Morris was involved in the selection and recruitment of senior staff members, oversaw remuneration of senior staff members and assisted with resource planning.

Baroness Morris did not respond to our detailed questions about her role with the Centre for Islamic Finance, which has charged £3.2 million to the university since 2019, according to public documents. She also did not tell us how much she has earned from being a director of the centre or whether her husband - the chair of the university’s board - had approved the arrangement. 

A university spokesperson told The Mill: “The University is grateful for the service of the outgoing Chair of Governors,  William Morris, since he assumed the role in 2020. The Governing Body is now electing a successor Chair, as the vacancy will soon arise.” They would offer no explanation of the reason for his sudden departure, but indicated that his current term as chair was due to end at the end of February.

Publicly available university governance documents state the chair of the board of governors is up for re-election every two years, but do not state the maximum term length for a chair from the day they were first elected. The university did not respond to a request for documentation relating to Morris’ tenure as chair of the board of governors, nor did they offer evidence of when his term is due to end.

In a brief phone call, Morris, a former judge at Bolton Crown Court, declined to answer detailed questions about his resignation, saying: “No, I’ve got nothing to say, thanks very much for the call.” 

An anonymous source who contacted The Mill via email and claims to be close to some governors, suggests his departure comes after board members raised questions about the conflict of interest highlighted by our reporting last month. The insider would offer no evidence for this claim, nor were they able to introduce us to any governors who could confirm this detail first-hand.

Phil Brickell, MP for Bolton West, called Morris' unexplained departure a major setback at a time when “students, staff and the whole borough are crying out for transparency”. He told us: “Many of my constituents desperately need reassurance that Bolton's university has addressed the publicly-reported allegations around poor financial governance and conflicts of interest at the institution, as well as the ongoing police investigation.”

But in May, it was Morris who announced via email that the university had suspended Holmes along with two other senior staff members following “serious allegations”. The email said the suspensions are a “neutral step, taken to protect the integrity of the process” and reassured staff that an interim leadership was in place and that the university’s “core functions and academic activities will continue without disruption”. At the time, a senior staff member told us of an “internal power struggle” that saw longstanding allies of Holmes launch attacks on his character. “They were once thick as thieves and now they’re all turning on each other,” they said.

The Mill’s sources could offer no indication of the conversations happening inside the board as it begins the process of naming his successor. In our efforts to obtain insight, we reached out to one of the board members, a private jet entrepreneur called Uday Nayak who is said to have raised concerns about the payments to CIF and indicated that he wouldn’t approve the accounts until the arrangement had been satisfactorily explained. Nayak declined to respond, saying: “As you will appreciate as a member of the Board of Governors, I am obliged to keep confidential all matters related to the Board.”

If you know more, please get in touch with Mollie. We are very used to dealing with confidential sources, and will never reveal the identity of contact unless they explicitly agree to their name appearing.

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