Exclusive: Documents show how Sacha Lord’s company obtained £400,000 of public money during the pandemic

…and that it requested £10,500 of emergency funding - to redesign a website

By Jack Dulhanty

A few weeks ago, Sacha Lord made a public appearance in his capacity as night time economy advisor to the mayor of Greater Manchester — his first official outing in months. He was helping to launch the Bee Network’s new night bus pilot, and the engagement went swimmingly. He shared photos on his social media and pointed out that the night buses were one of his first suggestions when he took on the high profile role in 2018. He told the BBC the 24-hour bus pilot was the "most exciting" development for the night-time economy during his tenure advising Andy Burnham. 

Putting Lord in front of the cameras for this key announcement made sense: he is, after all, responsible for championing the night-time economy. But given the controversy surrounding him, it wasn’t a straightforward decision. Lord’s appearance was preceded by a “whole load of commotion, umming and ahhing,” one source at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) told us. They describe a debate about whether one of Burnham’s closest advisors should be involved at all, a dilemma that reached the desk of the authority’s new chief executive Caroline Simpson.

(Lord’s spokesperson told us: “For The Mill to state that Sacha Lord has not appeared in public since May is absurd and shows the degree to which the publication is prepared to print misinformation and false reporting.” They linked to articles in which Lord is quoted in his capacity as night time economy advisor, but not to instances of him making public appearances in that role). 

Sacha Lord (left) at the launch of the Bee Network’s night bus pilot. Photo: Transport for Greater Manchester.

Lord and his former company, Primary Event Solutions, have been in the spotlight since May, when we revealed the firm received over £400,000 from Arts Council England’s Covid-19 support fund in 2021, after submitting a highly misleading application, a story that has subsequently been cited by outlets like the Observer and Private Eye.

Despite previously being a security company, Primary changed its name and seemed to invent a whole raft of achievements in order to get the funding. At the time, thousands of genuine organisations were desperately bidding for the same money in order to stay alive. “All the small arts charities are aghast at this,” Jo Yee Cheung, the CEO of music charity the Olympias Foundation, told us. “The level of scrutiny from the Arts Council is so high. I don’t understand how it got through.” 

For several days after our first story was published, little happened. But when further evidence came to light via our “community fact check” — including email signatures that showed Primary was still describing itself as a security company after the grant application was made, and a former senior member of staff telling us “I wasn't comfortable with this application” — the Arts Council announced it would be conducting “additional checks on the application from Primary Event Solutions”, and the GMCA announced a “fact finding exercise” of their own. 

Burnham told the BBC the claims would "be looked at properly", and Lord said he would "support and fully cooperate with the new checks". Lord withdrew his threat to sue The Mill, although he maintained the allegations against him were false. 

New documents 

It has now been four months since the investigations into Primary Events were launched and neither the Arts Council nor the GMCA have announced any findings. An Arts Council spokesperson has repeatedly assured us that its probe is ongoing, and the GMCA hasn’t confirmed — or denied — a tip sent anonymously to The Mill a few weeks ago that it has completed its checks into Lord’s company. “We won’t be commenting further until we receive the outcome of the checks being conducted by Arts Council England,” a spokesperson told us. 

The investigations centre on the same question: How did the newly christened Primary Event Solutions manage to get £401,928 of public money from the £1.57 billion Arts Council Recovery Fund, despite not performing many of the functions it claimed in its application? 

While we wait for the official investigations to report, we’ve been trying to examine the funding decision ourselves, including requesting from the Arts Council — under the Freedom of Information Act — all documents relating to their decision making. What they show is that ACE, the body entrusted with allocating public money towards the arts, identified clear holes in the application submitted by Primary Event Solutions, but nevertheless ended up falling for many of the company’s most easily falsifiable claims. 

Illustration by The Mill’s Jake Greenhalgh.

The assessors do not seem to have done cursory checks on claims like generating £41m of economic benefits to Greater Manchester, or employing more than 6,000 staff — a remarkable number for a firm that reported having just £20,000 in reserves. 

One request was too outlandish even for the Arts Council assessors to miss: in the midst of a pandemic, Lord’s company wanted £10,500 of taxpayers’ money to redesign its website.