There was a reason why Brian White, the former Labour MP who has died aged 59, was known in Milton Keynes as the “people’s councillor”. He was a stalwart member of the local council for two decades and his immense local popularity was responsible for his unexpected election to parliament in 1997, overturning a Conservative majority of 14,000 and winning by a slender 240 votes. Eight years later, it was a conflict between his loyalties to the constituency and to the Labour government over the issue of university tuition fees that probably cost him his seat and cut short his career in national politics.
The Blair government’s plan to introduce tuition fees posed a particular problem for students at the Open University, based in White’s constituency, and he led protracted negotiations in 2001 to protect the interests of people studying part-time, producing an agreement that met the concerns of the OU. Despite misgivings about other aspects of the bill, White decided to support it. “It is a pity,” he would later write, “that Department for Education … officials subsequently found ways to avoid their side of the deal.” The unpopularity of the Iraq war also cost him votes, although he did not vote to support it. He lost Milton Keynes North East, the more rural of the two seats in the rapidly expanding new town, by 1,665 votes in 2005.
But during his short time in the House of Commons, White made two significant contributions. He fulfilled one of his personal passions by introducing, as a private member’s bill, the Sustainable Energy Act 2003. This sets out requirements to keep successive governments up to speed on meeting climate change targets. There were difficult negotiations, and the legislation only just squeaked on to the statute book with 30 seconds to spare.
White’s more public claim to fame was to ensure that copies of all legislation continued to be printed on vellum, as has been the case since 1849, when mid-19th-century modernisers moved on from handwritten parchment. In 2000, under Tony Blair’s parliamentary modernisation programme, it was proposed to end the use of vellum in order to save £30,000 a year and a few goatskins, but thanks to White’s dogged determination a backbench revolt of all parties defeated the government.
The irony was that the MP was a systems analyst by profession and an ardent proponent of new technology, yet fought the forces of costcutting modernity in the interests of keeping in business the only remaining vellum-producing company in the country, which happened to be in Newport Pagnell, in his constituency.
He was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, the son of Edward, a Customs and Excise officer at Heathrow, and Jean (nee Bole), a VAT inspector from the Republic of Ireland, and was brought up in Belfast. As a 17-year-old who had been reading Solzhenitsyn, he objected to being asked for his passport at Heathrow when he flew in from his home city. “This is not the Soviet Union; we don’t have gulags here,” he objected, pointing out that he was travelling within the UK. As it was 1974 and the height of the Troubles, he was detained briefly.
In politics, his object was always to get results rather than to get into the newspapers, and he was scathing about parliamentary colleagues who made futile gestures in the chamber in preference to cutting a deal behind the scenes with an official who could make something happen. He sat on the regulatory reform committee and the public administration committee in the Commons, neither of them bodies that often attracted public attention, but his comprehension of the subjects with which they were dealing meant that real changes were made to the regulation requirements imposed on Ofcom, the communications regulator, and Ofgem, which deals with energy companies.
His first job, after education at the Methodist College in Belfast, was with Customs and Excise in Southend for eight years from 1976. He developed computer systems, including the VAT accounting system still used substantially in the form he designed, and he was also briefly given responsibility for on-course betting in horse racing. This meant that he was paid to go to race meetings in the knowledge that his bets would not leave him out of pocket, while other officials were checking that bookmakers were logging bets.
He travelled for a few years, working as an IT consultant in Washington DC, Finland and Canada. He married Leena Lindholm in Finland in 1984 and returned with her and her two sons to live and work in Milton Keynes. He was employed by Abbey National from 1986 until his election to the Commons.
He fought for Milton Keynes to be a unitary council authority, and was a council member from 1987 to 1997 and from 2007 until earlier this year. He was deputy leader and chairman of planning, securing approval for the MK Dons FC stadium, which opened in 2007, and was responsible in the 1990s for introducing a recycling system into the area. He was mayor in 2013–14.
White was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer earlier this year. He gave an interview to his local newspaper encouraging others not to ignore symptoms, as he had done.
He is survived by Leena and his two stepsons, Miikka and Kim.
• Brian Arthur Robert White, politician, born 5 May 1957, died 5 July 2016
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