Andy Burnham and the high price of Abu Dhabi’s billions

I n 2018 Andy Burnham received a letter. It came from a group of impassioned Manchester residents, disturbed by the fate of Ahmed Mansoor, a blogger and human rights activist imprisoned for criticising the government of the United Arab Emirates. That same government had been funding the regeneration of a huge chunk of their city, buying Manchester City Football Club and transforming the hollowed-out industrial buildings next door into trendy flats. Most commented 1 New Labour risks losing working class over net zero, says business secretary Politics 100 comments 2 The flag that gives moral licence to hatred Columnists 70 comments 3 New Kemi Badenoch’s Disraeli vibes are mighty tempting Columnists 30 comments 4 Peter Brookes’s Times cartoon: October 10, 2026 Cartoons 22 comments 5 New UK AI safety law to stop ‘loss of control’ over autonomous agents Technology 10 comments The campaigners had a simple request: to name one of Manchester’s streets after Mansoor. It would be, they wrote, “a fitting honour to bestow upon an individual who embodies so many of the qualities that the city and the wider region celebrates as a key part of its history”. Top stories 1 Trump Jr’s ex-fiancée ‘asked donor to pay 0k credit card bill’ US politics 2 Starbucks ‘explores takeover’ of Chipotle Mexican Grill US business The letter was also addressed to Lucy Powell, the MP for Manchester Central and now the deputy leader of the Labour Party, who responded by writing to the council and asking it to consider the proposal. However, the Manchester city council leader at the time, Sir Richard Leese, rejected the idea, saying: “Street naming is not my department, but longstanding policy is to not name streets after anybody still living or with no connection to the city.” Advertisement And what of Burnham, who by that point had been mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) for just under a year? He never responded. Off the record, his team told journalists that it was a city council matter, not a regional one. Top stories 1 How Bob Marley became an unlikely beneficiary of the slave trade History 2 Mortgage rates dip after weeks of painful rises Mortgages 3 ‘My husband’s family want us to pay £500 towards his sister’s holiday’ Ask Times Money Yet his silence on the issue, campaigners felt, spoke volumes. Since the 1990s Manchester had been on a journey of transformation; the crumbling post-industrial city dubbed “Gunchester” because of gang violence was rapidly becoming populated by high-rises and office blocks. Yet some residents felt that this renaissance had been at the expense of Manchester’s poorest, locked out of an increasingly expensive city centre. Manchester’s high-rise boom, driven by strategic partnerships and overseas capital under Burnham’s mayoral tenure Getty Images Sensing the public mood, Burnham had run on a pledge to eradicate rough sleeping and to use any leverage he had as mayor to push individual councils to “work with responsible developers that will honour obligations to affordable housing”. And yet, within his first year, he oversaw more than £55m in taxpayer-backed loans to UAE-linked developments, projects that contained no affordable housing. Manchester Life, a joint venture between Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) and the city council, applied three times to the Housing Investment Loans Fund, a pot overseen by the mayor, to develop properties in the east of Manchester around the Etihad Campus, and was successful each time. Advertisement None of the 453 homes built on the sites it was developing in Ancoats and New Islington were advertised as affordable housing despite local policies setting a 20 per cent target for developments of that size. TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP Documents seen by The Times show that ADUG — owned by Sheikh Mansour, the Emirati royal and Manchester City Football Club proprietor — had been given first preference on developments in the area. The ten-year contract with the city council, which rival developers complained was a “sweetheart deal”, was first reported by the Manchester Mill in 2024. The role played by the Emiratis in Manchester’s transformation has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks after an investigation found that Manchester City had arranged “sham contracts” with a number of commercial partners as part of a scheme to disguise secret funding of more than £830m. The club has lodged an appeal. The prime minister was accused of downplaying the seriousness of the guilty verdict last week when he praised ADUG as a “huge partner” in Manchester’s development. He later told the BBC: “I think it’s important to separate the football issues from wider investment.” Andy Burnham backtracks on City owner comments: ‘Nobody is above rules’ Advertisement The joint venture had been struck well before Burnham’s mayorship by Leese and the council’s former chief executive, the late Howard Bernstein. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash, when Manchester’s economic progress was under threat, the men aggressively courted foreign capital, facilitating Abu Dhabi’s entry into the city. Howard Bernstein in 2013 JOEL GOODMAN/LNP So strong was the relationship with Bernstein that Manchester City’s owners named a street near the Etihad Campus after him (council rules on naming did not apply to private land). After he retired in 2017 Bernstein became an adviser to the club on “commercial and development schemes” in and around the stadium. He died in 2024. Several Labour MPs maintain close ties with the club, which provided £11,000 worth of match tickets to seven Labour MPs in recent years. Among them is Powell, who accepted £2,360 worth of hospitality tickets from the club for five matches between April 2023 and March 2024. Her ardent support for the club spilt over awkwardly at the recent Labour Party conference when she addressed the fallout surrounding Manchester City by telling delegates: “Can I just say to all those United fans who have been gloating all week — you’re still crap and you know you are.” Lucy Powell at Etihad Stadium Burnham, who has been pictured attending City games at the Etihad Stadium in hospitality areas, is now facing mounting pressure to release full details of any hospitality or gifts he has received from the club or its Emirati backers, with his political opponents seizing on the issue. On Tuesday Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, said: “I think transparency is essential. If he’s got nothing to hide, then he should open the box.” Advertisement Jon Silver, a professor of urban geography at the University of Sheffield and the co-author of a damning report into the Manchester Life partnership — which concluded that Manchester city council had “sold the family silver too cheap” by agreeing to 999-year leaseholds “below comparable rates” with Abu Dhabi — told The Times that Burnham now needed to answer for the consequences of that deal. Silver said: “Burnham wasn’t a major figure in the transformation of the city, but he has used its perceived success to build his own political brand. So he now has to take responsibility for the limits of this model.” Campaigners and activists repeatedly urged Burnham, the figurehead for the region, “to take a stand around human rights in the UAE and its actions in Sudan, which he didn’t do”, Silver added. “Given the city celebrates itself as a bastion of democracy, his silence was, to the campaigners, quite damning.” Sir Richard Leese COLIN MCPHERSON/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES On Monday Leese defended the council’s deal with ADUG, which he said was brokered by the UK government, as being “good for the city”. “It was a time when development in Manchester had stopped,” he told the BBC. He added: “There was criticism at the time though — and there still is now — that the land was given away too cheaply by the city council. The point is, the investment from Abu Dhabi is what created the value.” Advertisement A spokesman for Manchester city council said: “More than ten years after these developments were first conceived, it would be wrong to look at those initial Manchester Life developments through the lens of the area’s current success — not the economic scenario and low housing demand at the time the partnership was created.” Manchester Life said all loans had been repaid with interest. A spokesman said that the so-called sweetheart deal was “a mutual right of first refusal, giving either party 30 days to accept an offer on the same terms and conditions as would otherwise be offered to a third party or to the market more generally”. A GMCA spokeswoman said its housing loans were “open to any developers looking to bring forward viable schemes throughout Greater Manchester” and that applications were assessed “for their deliverability, value for money and their contribution to our affordable and social housing priorities”.