My father, Norman Howard, who has died aged 95, was a councillor for the Labour party from the mid-1960s onwards, and for a number of years from 1973 was chair of the Greater London council’s planning committee.
In that position he played a key role in decisions such as granting permission for Concorde to fly into Heathrow and on the redevelopment of Covent Garden. He also dug the first turf for the start of the London Docklands development at St Katharine Docks, and was particularly proud of signing an agreement with London Transport to carry out a 1973 election pledge allowing free bus travel for London’s pensioners.
Having been a member of the Labour party since the age of 16, he began his political career as a public representative in 1964 when he was elected as a councillor for Kingston upon Thames in south-west London.
Norman was born in Acton, west London, to Harold, a haulage contractor, and Alice (nee Goater). Alice died when Norman was eight, and two years later he, his older brother, Don, and youngest sister, Hazel, were evacuated in the first week of the second world war. Don left school before the war ended, but Norman and Hazel spent the next six years billeted, separately, with a variety of host families in Devon.
Norman became head boy of Southwark Central school, which had been evacuated to Newton Abbot in Devon. However, when he returned to Acton at the end of the war, he had barely started in the sixth form before he was called up for national service, and his formal education ended.
In 1949 he started work as a darkroom assistant at a photographic printers in Ealing, west London, then moved to Southampton in 1951 to become a political agent supporting the successful re-election of the Labour MP Horace King (later to become speaker of the House of Commons). They formed a lifelong friendship, with King describing him as “a hard worker and a man of high integrity and honesty”.
In 1956 Norman was invited to join the new London team of the leftwing newspaper Forward, and he subsequently worked as a journalist on Farmers Weekly, Reynold’s News (later renamed Sunday Citizen) and at the Board of Trade, before becoming assistant secretary at the Post Office Engineering Union in 1966. In 1984 he was appointed as chief press officer at British Telecom, for whom he worked, latterly on a consultancy basis, until he retired in 1998.
Norman was then an active member of the Labour Heritage Group, and co-founded and became secretary of the Aneurin Bevan Society. He also wrote a book, A New Dawn, about the 1945 Labour general election victory, which was published in 2005.
It was in Southampton that Norman met and married Joyce Randell. She died in 2014. He is survived by his children, Jane and me, four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and his sister, Hazel.
