How Andy Burnham's wife is set to profit from the new green revolution championed by her husband in Manchester: JAMES TOZER reveals the controversy – and how she made him an eternal laughing stock

As an evangelist for green technologies, life for Marie-France Van Heel, known as Frankie, is frequently ‘organised chaos’.

Formerly a high-flying brand consultant, the Dutch-born 56-year-old says she came on board as a senior executive at a thriving Manchester electric car start-up after its growth prospects had been ‘cemented’ by a lucrative local authority deal.

Hundreds of public EV chargers in the city and beyond now bear the appropriately green livery of the fast-growing firm, Be.EV.

But it is the crucial seven-year contract awarded to the business – worth £5.4 million to date – which has led to renewed scrutiny over the past fortnight.

That is because the deal in question was with Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), responsible for delivering the city region’s elected Mayor Andy Burnham’s transport policies. Which has proved controversial – because Ms Van Heel also happens to be Mr Burnham’s wife of 26 years.

It must be stressed that there is nothing secret about the arrangement. In 2022, Mr Burnham hit out at ‘frankly disgraceful’ claims regarding Ms Van Heel during a row over plans to charge polluting vehicles up to £60 a day to enter Greater Manchester.

He stressed that while her marketing and brand agency had worked with Be.EV, which has held a contract to operate and maintain TfGM’s EV charging units since 2019, she had ‘no direct financial relationship’ with its parent company and did not own any shares. Both sides say the 2019 contract was awarded through a competitive procurement process.

In possibly the most damaging moment of Mr Burnham’s two-and-a-bit terms as Mayor, the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) was scrapped, with an estimated £100million in public money wasted. Far less well-known, however, is how Ms Van Heel’s connections to Be.EV have deepened in the meantime. 

Mr Burnham met his future wife at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam College in 1988 (pictured together during their time at university)

In July 2023, she left her agency to become Be.EV’s chief marketing officer, rising to the role of chief customer officer in July 2024.

In September of that year the partially employee-owned firm announced she had been appointed to its board of directors. It is important to say that Mr Burnham declares her job in his register of mayoral interests, as he is required to do.

The decision to award the contract in 2019 was taken by TfGM’s Executive Board, which he does not sit on or attend. He also formally steps back from decisions relating to his wife’s firm.

The link has nevertheless attracted new scrutiny since Mr Burnham announced his candidacy for the Makerfield by-election – itself a springboard for his ambitions to oust Sir Keir Starmer from Number Ten.

In a recent Sunday Times profile, his wife was described by a close friend as ‘beautiful, very gentle, and highly intelligent’. Before Burnham’s campaign kicked off, she was a prolific poster on professional networking site LinkedIn.

Her ebullient online presence attracted thousands of followers. Yet since her husband dramatically re-entered national politics, Ms Van Heel’s page has mysteriously vanished.

With a career which has seen her work in senior marketing roles for the likes of MTV and Sky, Ms Van Heel is undoubtedly amply qualified for the role at Be.EV. At the same time, an opportunity to join a start-up in a fast-growing field was inevitably attractive – and potentially highly lucrative.

Companies House filings show she now owns a modest 252 shares in parent company Iduna Infrastructure, to which the Amey MAP Services unit which delivers the Greater Manchester contract was divested in 2021.

But the Daily Mail has learnt that she is a beneficiary of a long-term incentive plan in the firm. Such arrangements typically promise senior employees future shares if they meet performance targets, giving her a personal stake in its future growth.

Ministers insist they will not back down on a ban on the sale of entirely combustion engine-powered cars from 2030 – despite the EU being under pressure to push back its own 2035 deadline.

It means that in just a few years’ time, firms like Be.EV which are building Britain’s charging infrastructure will be able to tap into a vastly increased number of customers and therefore increased revenue.

A footprint in Manchester could give it a head start as a low proportion of the city’s 590,000 residents benefit from off-street parking, meaning they cannot install EV chargers at home. With Mancunians owning 170,000 cars, it points to soaring demand for public charging points.

Speaking in January 2025, Ms Van Heel explained how the contract with her husband’s authority had boosted Be.EV’s prospects – as well as what a motivation it is to have a financial stake in its future success.

Praising its founders for giving employees ‘a piece of the action’, she told podcaster Liz Allan: ‘So I am now a shareholder in the business, as are quite a few members of my team, which is just brilliant.’

It means ‘we will all benefit from the success of Be.EV because we are all shareholders’, she added.

Saying Be.EV regarded itself as ‘a national network in the North-West’, Ms Van Heel added that the ‘relationship with Transport for Greater Manchester cemented the start of our journey in this space’. TfGM delivers transport policies for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), headed by Mr Burnham in his role as elected mayor.

During Mr Burnham’s two-and-a-bit terms as Mayor, the Clean Air Zone was scrapped, with an estimated £100million in public money wasted

Mr Burnham and Ms Van Heel have three children: Jimmy, Rosie and Annie, all now in their 20s

Speaking of the ‘mentality, the speed, the workload, and the emotional commitment’ of being at a start-up like Be.EV, Ms Van Heel said it took time to ‘get used to’ the ‘level of workload’ and ‘organised chaos… But, yeah, I am enjoying it’.

As of July 2025, Greater Manchester had 1,771 publicly accessible electric vehicle charging devices. The firm currently manages 197 EV chargers on behalf of TfGM.

The contract between TfGM and Be.EV was agreed in 2019, but did not attract public attention until the CAZ controversy. Ms Van Heel was slurred in cruel signs erected by opponents of the scheme to charge polluting vehicles. In a ‘personal statement’ issued in February 2022, Mr Burnham set out the ‘facts’ in response to ‘serious allegations’ about ‘my wife’s financial affairs’.

‘Marie-France is employed by Heavenly, a small marketing and brand agency,’ he wrote. ‘She works with a number of their clients, including Iduna Infrastructure Limited.’

Mr Burnham continued: ‘Iduna owns Amey MAP Services Limited, which has a contract with TfGM to operate the public EV network under the brand name Be.EV.

‘Marie-France has no direct financial relationship with Iduna. She does not own any shares in them and does not receive any bonus nor incentive payments from them.’

The Mayor added: ‘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. I have set out the facts and ask that this now stops.’

According to its latest accounts, Be.EV’s parent company, Iduna Infrastructure, made a pre-tax loss of £13,287,319 in 2024. But while the numbers are unimpressive, its business strategy is to install charging points ahead of anticipated growing demand.

Analysts say that makes it well-placed maximise market share and turn a profit once petrol and diesel vehicles are phased out. Investors are certainly betting that Be.EV will be a success.

In 2022 it was backed to the tune of £110million by an investment fund owned by Octopus Energy Generation, with a further £55million in debt financing from NatWest and a German bank in 2024 to support the rollout of charging points.

Not all users report a positive experience, however – indeed on popular customer feedback site TrustPilot, six out of ten reviews awarded Be.EV just one star. While it is a small pool of 34 write-ups, the site nevertheless rates its customer service as ‘poor’, with drivers complaining of having money taken out of their accounts even when chargers fail to work. Reviews on Google are better at 3.96 out of 5 from 861 responses, with internal customer satisfaction data understood to be even more favourable.

TfGM says it ‘regularly monitors’ the firm’s performance. Be.EV’s contract with TfGM is due to expire in December 2026 – but with an option to extend it for up to six years.

Meanwhile, Mr Burnham’s authority is preparing to award a £16 million capital contract to plan and deliver charging infrastructure for residents without off-street parking. However, the Daily Mail has established that Ms Van Heel’s firm is not in the running.

Mr Burnham met his future wife at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College in 1988. In the book Head North in which he and Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram set out their ‘vision’, Mr Burnham speaks of how Cambridge was an ‘alien world’.

But he recalls how his kudos of being from the North-West and its burgeoning music scene gave him ‘an instant edge’. Arriving for his second year in 1989, by which time the ‘Madchester’ scene was taking off, the future politician was ‘trying to impress the newly arrived first year girls’ when ‘after a few failed attempts’ he found one who was Dutch but lived in Belgium and loved The Smiths’. ‘The rest, as they say, is history,’ he adds.

Indeed they went on to have three children, Jimmy, Rosie and Annie, all now in their 20s.

While he and Marie-France hit it off immediately, the young Mr Burnham did have to endure his new girlfriend appearing on ITV Saturday night show Blind Date in January 1992. She later explained that she agreed to be a contestant in the hope it would boost her ambition to become a children’s TV presenter. Frankie told presenter Cilla Black she was born in Holland and raised in the US, was studying social and political sciences, captained the college women’s football team and fancied actor Matt Dillon.

The young Mr Burnham had to endure his new girlfriend appearing on ITV Saturday night show Blind Date in January 1992

Dressed in a green blazer and bell-bottomed trousers, she picked floppy-haired, dungaree-clad ‘Will from Surrey’ out of the three male contenders, earning them a trip to Gibraltar.

‘I watched the TV from behind the sofa through my fingers,’ Mr Burnham said later.

Fortunately for him, the link-up was a disaster, with Will accusing her of being a ‘cold fish’ before she threw a cushion at him. Things got even worse backstage, with Marie-France said to have told him: ‘F*** off, I never want to see you again.’ As it turned out, she would – and in hugely ironic circumstances, as revealed by The Mail on Sunday after Mr Burnham was appointed Culture Secretary by Gordon Brown in 2008.

Three years after the couple married, in 2003 she was in the Commons bar with her newly-elected Labour MP husband when ‘Will from Surrey’ walked in. Will Harris, to give him his full name, was by now marketing director of the Conservative Party, of all things.

‘I got a lot of teasing from a lot of other Labour MPs,’ Mr Burnham recalled later.

For his part, in 2008 Mr Harris – by then married with children and working for Finnish telecommunications company Nokia – joked: ‘She wouldn’t have known it at the time, but she must have been faced with a choice between the Conservatives and Labour, and she picked Labour.’

He insisted he had been ‘stitched up’ by the Blind Date team who told her Ms Van Heel had ‘been an absolute b***h’ about him.

For her part, she later told an interviewer she had hoped appearing on the show might ‘raise my profile’ and lead to a job in TV. ‘Twenty years of intermittent mickey-taking was the result, but I’m happy to embrace my 15 minutes of fame/shame!’ she added.

She also recalled ‘being told to leave’ the Commons public gallery during Mr Burnham’s maiden speech as an MP for – in her mocking words – ‘outrageously’ breast-feeding.

Ms Van Heel later revealed how aged 40 she underwent a double mastectomy after a genetic test showed she could be at risk from breast cancer. Her sister Claire died of an aggressive form of the disease at just 39.

She has largely stayed out of politics – although outspoken tweets attacking her husband’s political opponents were revealed when he stood for the Labour leadership in 2015.

A 2013 post asking ‘Can’t we have a military coup to get rid of our democratically elected government???’ was clearly not intended to be taken literally. But she also branded Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, an ‘idiot’, and described then health secretary Jeremy Hunt as looking ‘bloody awful’.

Meanwhile in 2014 – prior to Labour’s general election defeat – her firm provided almost £60,000 worth of free branding and marketing advice to Labour. The gift – disclosed to the Electoral Commission – saw her dubbed then leader Ed Miliband’s new image ‘guru’ – was from Heavenly, the creative consultancy where she was strategy director.

Be.EV declined to answer detailed questions about its contract with TfGM or its performance. In a statement to the Daily Mail, it said: ‘Marie-France’s role at Be.EV is entirely independent and all contracts have been awarded through the proper procurement processes. We have no further comment.’

Be.EV has around 2,500 charging bays nationally, meaning its contract in Greater Manchester accounts for just over one in 20 of the miles worth of power its network supplies daily.

A GMCA spokesman said: ‘We are satisfied that the Mayor has met his legal obligations to register disclosable pecuniary interests and we do not accept any claim that he broke our rules.

‘Iduna has not tendered for Greater Manchester’s latest EV charging contract and no preferred supplier has been selected.’