Andy Burnham has hit out at critics of Greater Manchester’s clean air zone (CAZ) whom he says have made “frankly disgraceful” false claims about his wife’s professional links to an electric car charging network.
The Greater Manchester mayor accuses opponents of the CAZ of spreading false information about Marie-France van Heel, a marketing executive who married Burnham in 2000.
Van Heel is the strategy director and managing partner of a small marketing and brand agency, Heavenly. One of her clients is Be.EV, which has a contract with Transport for Greater Manchester to maintain and grow the region’s electric vehicle charging network.
Burnham declared this at a Greater Manchester combined authority (GMCA) meeting in September 2021, recusing himself from a discussion of the region’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure strategy so that he was not part of the decision-making.
But as opposition to the CAZ has grown, Van Heel’s relationship to Be.EV has been widely exaggerated online in order to suggest the Burnham family will personally profit if owners of polluting vehicles switch to electric cars as a result of the CAZ.
There have been widely shared false claims that the couple own shares in Be.EV, that Van Heel will receive bonuses from the firm if their profits increase as a result of the CAZ, and that she has a financial interest in the cameras used to monitor vehicles entering the zone.
The scheme, which would impose daily charges on some high-emission vehicles, excluding private cars, had been due to begin at the end of May.
In 2017 the government ordered Greater Manchester to clean up illegal levels of air pollution after clean air campaigners won a case at the supreme court in 2017. Along with a number of other urban areas, it was told to use a charging zone as the “default option” in order to encourage people to scrap polluting vehicles.
Despite the order coming from the Conservative government, Tory MPs and even Boris Johnson have become loud opponents of the Greater Manchester CAZ.
At prime minister’s questions on 2 February, the prime minister said: “It has become clear that the scheme proposed by the Labour mayor in Manchester is completely unworkable and will do more damage to businesses and residents in Manchester.”
Shortly afterwards the government agreed to delay the CAZ until July, after the GMCA presented evidence to the government showing that the impact of issues such as Covid-19 on supply chains and the price and availability of secondhand vehicles will make it harder for people to upgrade to cleaner vehicles.
In the past year CAZs have launched in Birmingham, Bath and Portsmouth, with others schemes set for Bradford and Bristol by the end of the year.
In a statement on Friday, Burnham explained why he declared his wife’s connection to Be.EV: “Even though this is a minor private interest in relation to EV charging – and not directly related to the CAZ – I still chose to declare it, and remove myself from any decision-making, so that there could be no perception of a conflict of interest nor any suggestion of privileged information being misused. More broadly, we do not own any shares in any company and receive no income other than our salaries. Given this, some of the claims that have been made about my wife are frankly disgraceful.”
