Manchester Pride has been put into voluntary liquidation and is being assessed by the charities regulator, with the future of the event in doubt.

Artists, suppliers and freelancers have been left unpaid, some of them owed thousands, the performers’ and creatives’ union Equity said.

After nearly a week of speculation and a period of financial difficulty, Pride’s organisers cited rising costs, declining ticket sales and an unsuccessful bid to host Euro Pride as factors behind the decision.

The organisation is a charity and limited company that campaigns for LGBTQ+ equality and puts on the annual parade and live events.

The company had been in financial difficulty, according to latest accounts, and gone through a series of directors in recent months. All three directors appointed in August resigned this month.

An up-to-date picture of Manchester Pride’s finances is not available, as the last update was submitted in September 2024 for the year up to December 2023, showing a consolidated deficit of nearly £500,000.

At that point, the company said it could continue to exist, as a “going concern”, as it said a review of the charity’s strategy would take place, detailed budgets and cash forecasts had been prepared for 2024 and 2025, and it had been in surplus up to August 2024.

Manchester Pride said at the time it had a plan to diversify income streams and rebuild cash reserves.

Accounts for 2024 are not due until 31 December this year.

As a charity, Manchester Pride Limited is regulated by the Charity Regulator, which said it had opened a compliance case “to assess concerns raised” about the organisation. “We are engaging with the trustees to help inform any next regulatory steps,” a spokesperson said.

It’s understood that Manchester Pride submitted a serious incident report relating to its finances.

What went wrong?

Directly impacted by the liquidation is freelance event manager Abbie Ashall, who is owed £2,000 after her pay day was missed in September.

Ms Ashall said she was not the worst hit; others are out of pocket even more, having hired and paid people for events they were contracted to put on, all with the expectation of being paid by Manchester Pride.

She had been an employee of Manchester Pride from summer 2023 to January 2025, but left to go freelance when staff members left and were not being replaced, raising concerns about resources to deal with an increasing workload. It was at that point that she assumed things were not going well financially.

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She continued to work for the organisation on a freelance basis, project managing the 2025 parade and now producing a musical, Spraywatch: A Beautiful Rescue.

Manchester Pride’s difficulties can, in part, be attributed to its model of getting people to pay for a wristband to access sites which are public spaces.

“I don’t think that the business model worked at the end of the day,” Ms Ashall said.

“And I think not enough people were buying tickets… we’re seeing a massive trend in the events and festival industry that people just are not buying”.

What next?

Creatives waiting to be paid have been urged to contact the Equity union.

“We are collecting contractual information to pursue all options to recoup money owed, and we will begin these processes immediately,” said Equity’s North West official, Karen Lockney.

“We are also speaking with Manchester City Council and other stakeholders to ensure artists’ voices are heard in discussions about the future of Pride in the city, ensuring that Manchester gets the Pride it deserves”.

Details of those owed money have been passed to the liquidators, Manchester Pride’s board of trustees said in a statement.

What does this mean for Pride in Manchester?

A Pride celebration will take place in August next year with council support, Manchester City Council said.

“There will undoubtedly be anxiety about what the future holds – but Pride is much more than the organisation that runs it. We want to support a new chapter for Manchester Pride weekend, which will take place next August.

“The council will play a full and active role in bringing together the LGBTQ community to help shape how the city moves forward to ensure a bright and thriving future for Manchester Pride.”

You know bad economic news is looming when a Chancellor of the Exchequer tries to get their retaliation in first.

Treasury guidance on Tuesday afternoon that Rachel Reeves has prioritised easing the cost of living had to be seen in the light of inflation figures, published this morning, and widely expected to rise above 4% for the first time since the aftermath of the energy crisis.

In that context the fact consumer price inflation in September remained level at 3.8% counts as qualified good news for the Treasury, if not consumers.

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The figure remains almost double the Bank of England target of 2%, the rate when Labour took office, but economists at the Bank and beyond do expect this month to mark the peak of this inflationary cycle.

That’s largely because the impact of higher energy prices last year will drop out of calculations next month.

The small surprise to the upside has also improved the chances of an interest rate cut before the end of the year, with markets almost fully pricing expectations of a reduction to 3.75% by December, though rate-setters may hold off at their next meeting early next month.

September’s figure also sets the uplift in benefits from next April so this figure may improve the internal Treasury forecast, but at more than double the rate a year ago it will still add billions to the bill due in the new year.

For consumers there was good news and bad, and no comfort at all from the knowledge that they face the highest price increases in Europe.

Fuel prices rose but there was welcome relief from the rate of food inflation, which fell to 4.5% from 5.1% in August, still well above the headline rate and an unavoidable cost increase for every household.

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The chancellor will convene a meeting of cabinet ministers on Thursday to discuss ways to ease the cost of living and has signalled that cutting energy bills is a priority.

The easiest lever for her to pull is to cut the VAT rate on gas and electricity from 5% to zero, which would reduce average bills by around £80 but cost £2.5bn.

More fundamental reform of energy prices, which remain the second-highest in Europe for domestic bill payers and the highest for industrial users, may be required to bring down inflation fast and stimulate growth.

If you eat beef, and ever stop to wonder where and how it’s produced, Jonathan Chapman’s farm in the Chiltern Hills west of London is what you might imagine. 

A small native herd, eating only the pasture beneath their hooves in a meadow fringed by beech trees, their leaves turning to match the copper coats of the Ruby Red Devons, selected for slaughter only after fattening naturally during a contented if short existence.

But this bucolic scene belies the turmoil in the beef market, where herds are shrinking, costs are rising, and even the promise of the highest prices in years, driven by the steepest price increase of any foodstuff, is not enough to tempt many farmers to invest.

For centuries, a symbolic staple of the British lunch table, beef now tells us a story about spiralling inflation and structural decline in agriculture.

Mr Chapman has been raising beef for just over a decade. A former champion eventing rider with a livery yard near Chalfont St Giles, the main challenge when he shifted his attention from horses to cows was that prices were too low.

“Ten years ago, the deadweight carcass price for beef was £3.60 a kilo. We might clear £60 a head of cattle,” he says. “The only way we could make the sums add up was to process and sell the meat ourselves.”

Processing a carcass doubles the revenue, from around £2,000 at today’s prices to £4,000. That insight saw his farm sprout a butchery and farm shop under the Native Beef brand. Today, they process two animals a week and sell or store every cut on site, from fillet to dripping.

Today, farmgate prices are nearly double what they were in 2015 at £6.50 a kilo, down slightly from the April peak of almost £7, but still up around 25% in a year.

For consumers that has made paying more than £5 for a pack of mince the norm. For farmers, rising prices reflect rising costs, long-term trends, and structural changes to the subsidy regime since Brexit.

“Supply and demand is the short answer,” says Mr Chapman.

“Cow numbers have been falling roughly 3% a year for the last decade, probably in this country. Since Brexit, there is virtually no direct support for food in this country. Well over 50% of the beef supply would have come from the dairy herd, but that’s been reducing because farmers just couldn’t make money.”

Political, environmental and economic forces

Beef farmers also face the same costs of trading as every other business. The rise in employers’ national insurance and the minimum wage have increased labour costs, and energy prices remain above the long-term average.

Then there is the weather, the inescapable variable in agriculture that this year delivered a historically dry summer, leaving pastures dormant, reducing hay and silage yields and forcing up feed costs.

Native Beef is not immune to these forces. Mr Chapman has reduced his suckler herd from 110 to 90, culling older cows to reduce costs this winter. If repeated nationally, the full impact of that reduction will only be fully clear in three years’ time, when fewer calves will reach maturity for sale, potentially keeping prices high.

That lag demonstrates one of the challenges in bringing prices down.

Basic economics says high prices ought to provide an opportunity and prompt increased supply, but there is no quick fix. Calves take nine months to gestate and another 20 to 24 months to reach maturity, and without certainty about price, there is greater risk.

There is another long-term issue weighing on farmers of all kinds: inheritance tax. The ending of the exemption for agriculture, announced in the last budget and due to be imposed from next April, has undermined confidence.

Neil Shand of the National Beef Association cites farmers who are spending what available capital they have on expensive life insurance to protect their estates, rather than expanding their herds.

“The farmgate price is such that we should be in an environment that we should be in a great place to expand, there is a market there that wants the product,” he says. “But the inheritance tax challenge has made everyone terrified to invest in something that will be more heavily taxed in the future.”

While some of the issues are domestic, the UK is not alone.

Beef prices are rising in the US and Europe too, but that is small consolation to the consumer, and none at all to the cow.