The Arts Council has concluded its investigation into a Culture Recovery Fund grant made to a company controlled by Sacha Lord, chair of the Night Time Industries Association and Night Time Economy Advisor to Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.
The result: Arts Council is now seeking repayment of £401,928 awarded to the company, Primary Event Solutions, during the COVID pandemic, and Lord has quit as Night Time Economy Advisor to Burnham and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.
The reality: Arts Council is unlikely to get back any of the money and has taken a significant amount of time to investigate what was a fairly straight-forward matter - with a response that opens serious questions about what processes for oversight, due diligence and monitoring of grants England’s primary arts funding body has in place to safeguard public money.
In a statement issued this morning, an Arts Council spokesperson told CMU, “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. 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.”
Lord’s own response to the outcome of the investigation claims that “Arts Council England have found that there is no finding against [Primary Event Solutions] that it deliberately misled the Arts Council in this application”, and points to a link on the Arts Council website relating to how and when Arts Council might withdraw a grant.
That page, which is about “Fast Track” grant withdrawals, says “There may be a reason for us to withdraw a grant immediately when a breach of the terms and conditions presents a significant reputational risk to the Arts Council or an immediate risk to our grant. An example would be when a grantee is an organisation in liquidation, or where it is clear that it is insolvent”.
The Arts Council investigation was initially launched in May last year following allegations made by local news site The Manchester Mill in an article with the headline “Did Sacha Lord cheat his way to £400,000 of public money during the pandemic?” alleging that Primary Event Solutions Limited had “deliberately lied” in its application to the Culture Recovery Fund.
As a result of that article, Lord threatened to sue The Mill for libel, and demanded that the publication take down the article and issue an apology to him.
Primary Event Solutions Limited was put into administration on 11 Sep 2023, months before The Mill published its allegations..
However, it was clear there were possible problems at the company as early as November 2021 when a first gazette notice for the company to be struck off was published, after it failed to file statutory documents with Companies House. In March 2022 one of the directors of the company resigned, and in August 2023 - shortly before the company was placed into liquidation - the company registrar was, once again, threatening to strike the company off the register.
With so many indications that the company may have been facing problems it seems curious that Arts Council took so long to act. If - as Lord’s statement seems to imply - the grant was withdrawn simply because the company entered administration, Arts Council now has questions to answer about why its investigation took so long and why it took no action until public pressure from media forced it to launch an investigation. CMU has formally asked the Arts Council to clarify this point. However, at the time we published, it had not acknowledged or responded to that question.
Lord himself says that he is “concerned over inconsistencies and a lack of proportionality in the handling of this matter. Not only has this application been reviewed twice previously by the organisation's Counter Fraud team, which, after examining the financial evidence and invoicing, concluded on both occasions that it was compliant with grant guidance”.
In a statement today, addressing Lord’s resignation as Night Time Economy Advisor, Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says, “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”, adding, “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”.
Notably - unlike other statements issued to CMU by the GMCA press team - this one is directly attributed to Burnham himself, rather than a GMCA spokesperson.
Lord’s statement points out that the CRF application submitted by Primary Event Solutions did contain “a small number of unintended oversights which have impacted the application’s clarity under the criteria” - something that Arts Council apparently flagged, but seemingly allowed to pass through its own internal review of the application.
The application by PES - according to Arts Council’s own scoring - contained “some inconsistencies with the narrative and the supporting financial statements provided”, and flags that “budget, cashflow and expenditure section of the application include costs that appear to relate to physical events”, adding that there are “inconsistencies in the expenditure budgets and the delivery plan”, and that some of the costs outlined in the application “do not appear to offer value for money or demonstrate essential expenditure to support the organisation transition”.
Of greater concern is that it’s been an open secret in the industry for some time that Lord’s company was going to be asked to repay the money, with reliable sources first telling CMU that this was going to be the outcome of the investigation as early as September 2024.
That investigation by the Arts Council has taken nearly nine months to conclude - something that Lord says has “taken a significant, personal toll on myself and my family”.
When we informally put it to Arts Council back in September that Lord’s company was going to be asked to repay the money, push-back by the organisation was robust: we were told that we were wrong, and that the decision was still pending and would be announced when the investigation concluded, and that our sources were unreliable - because it was highly unlikely that there could be a leak within the Arts Council
We then put the question formally to the Arts Council communications team, an Arts Council spokesperson told CMU that “until these checks are complete we are unable to comment further”, adding, pointedly, that Arts Council “must feel confident that we can carry out any audits without interference or concern that details will be shared publicly which could jeopardise investigations”.
With the outcome of the investigation an open secret across the industry for some time now, quite why it has taken more than four months for Arts Council to conclude its investigation and confirm that Lord’s company would indeed be asked to repay the money is currently unclear.
With today’s announcement, Lord has stepped down from his role of Night Time Economy Advisor to Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham, saying “the emotional toll and experience over recent months has given me the opportunity to reflect and gradually step back from my role in Greater Manchester. 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”.
An Arts Council spokesperson has now clarified:
Following Sacha Lord's public statement, we can now confirm that after our thorough review, we found that the following clause from the grant’s terms and conditions was breached:
8.3.8 You have supplied us with any information that is wrong or misleading, either by mistake or because you were trying to mislead us.
We are not required by this clause to determine whether the misleading information was supplied deliberately. However, we have found that the applicant, Primary Event Solutions, breached this condition, whether by mistake or otherwise, leading us to withdraw the grant. We have contacted the liquidators and requested that they add Arts Council England as creditors.
