The Office of Deputy Prime Minster can be a difficult and rather unforgiving role. Bound by the peculiarities of the British version of Westminster parliamentary politics – with its awkward marriage of the executive and legislature, lack of federalism, and blurring of party politics and personal mandates – there are no term limits for Prime Ministers. DPM’s have no clear path to premiership, no constitutionally defined mandate – no reason why the media and the people should listen to you, not the Leader.
While some prior holders (or equivalent) have ascended to No.10 either because they won an election (Lord Roseberry, Earl Atlee) or following the retirement of the prior holder (Earl Beaconsfield) – most DPM’s have remained in office, their legacy largely defined by the PM they served (Viscount Whitelaw, Lord Howe). Though they are crucial for the smooth operating of No.10, Thatcher once remarked that every Prime Minister “needs a Willie”, many DPM’s never leave the shadow of their bosses.
This is not the case for John Prescott, who passed last week. Often caricatured for his working class background, union stewardship and pugilistic outbursts, Prescott – an economic history graduate of both Ruskin College and the nascent University of Hull, and tutored by the eminent socialist academic Raphael Samuel – was a domineering ideological force in the Labour party as it approached government. As both the Secretary of State for Transport and Local Government, and Deputy Prime Minister, this deeply optimistic and ideological approach to Government was then fully directed at the real estate sector and town planning.
The impact he had on these sectors during the Blair years can be seen in the testimonials that have poured in since his passing. In Housing Today, Dave Rogers has cited the progress he personally drove in construction safety, in the AJ John McElgunn has highlighted the regeneration initiatives spearheaded by the Urban Task Force which Prescott arranged, and in Building, Margaet Ford has spoken of his close relationship to English Partnerships. But at Redwood, we are most acutely aware of the role he played in embedding public consultation into the planning process.
One of the first Secretaries of State to adapt to the requirements of both the 1998 Aarhaus Convention (which established the public’s right to participate in decision-making) and the 1990 Town & Country Planning Act (which established statements of community involvement), Prescott was crucial in developing our contemporary approach to public consultation. His motivation was the feeling that regeneration projects had not always carried community support or ‘brought people along on the journey’ because communities had not been sufficiently involved.
Prescott’s response began with the guidance handbook, Involving Communities in Urban and Rural Regeneration, and emerged over several white papers (notably the ‘eight guiding principles’ found in the Strong and Prosperous Communities (2006) White Paper, and the Planning for a Sustainable Future (2007) White Paper). Prescott and his super-ministry, the Department for the Environment, Transport & the Regions (DETR) embedded the principle that local consultation mattered for building design throughout the planning process.
Under his leadership, DETR and the Architecture Forum developed road shows that publicised community consultation programmes and documents – whilst private sector works like Nick Wates’ The Community Planning Handbook expanded this guidance across the development industry. Finally, from a finance perspective, Prescott-funded developments through initiatives such as the New Deal for Communities pipeline required significant community engagement to progress, and successfully transitioned public consultation from the extraordinary – and deeply political – to an established feature of development.