The former Manchester Labour MP Andrew Bennett, who has died aged 85, devoted most of his adult life to public service, as a school teacher and a councillor, before then spending 31 years in the House of Commons. He always put the pursuit of the political results he sought before any sort of personal recognition. A man of high principle, he believed in civil liberties, human rights and equal opportunities, and attempted to translate those beliefs in a way that improved other people’s lives.
He cared about the day-to-day issues of his constituents and would draw attention to the importance of allotments and parks and cemeteries in consideration of urban planning. He is also due some credit for Manchester’s orbital M60 motorway, created by joining existing motorways to form a city circuit, which he opened when the final section was completed in 2000.
A Westminster colleague commented on a parliamentary website that his life was “a tribute to the idea that you could achieve much if you don’t want the credit”. He was a quiet but persistent politician and personally consistent in standing up for his own strongly held convictions. Besides politics his great passion was hill-walking. When walking alone he would practise the perfect speech (which he admitted he never delivered) and he once made an actual speech, shouting into the storm, from a windy hilltop in the Peak District named Ward’s Piece, when marking the centenary of the eponymous pioneer politician GHB “Bert” Ward (1876-1957), a member of the Labour Representation Committee who campaigned for walkers’ rights.
Bennett campaigned for the right to roam legislation, and was elected president of the Ramblers’ Association in 1988 and made an honorary life member in 1989. When Labour conferences were held in Blackpool he would encourage colleagues to escape the jamboree for a ramble.
He was on the left wing of the Labour party, for which he first campaigned in 1945 with his parents and younger sister, Bronwen, and it was probably his destiny, rather than misfortune, not to become a minister. He was an education spokesman under the leadership of Neil Kinnock for five years from 1983, but left the frontbench after the party renounced unilateral disarmament. For the greater part of his political career Labour was in opposition at Westminster and by the time Tony Blair was elected in 1997 it was evident that Bennett was too much his own man to toe any government line.
By then he had perfected his skills as a parliamentary tactician. He had put in time on seemingly dull bodies – as a member of the liaison committee and then chair of the statutory instruments select committee – and understood Commons procedure sufficiently to be able to use it for political advantage. His political passions were education and the environment, and having chaired the environment select committee from 1994, when Labour took office three years later he assumed the powerful post of jointly chairing the massive select committee on environment, transport, local government and the regions.
His expertise was such that he was able to use critical select committee reports as an effective means of pursuing policy issues in the respective government departments. He was an assiduous parliamentarian who worked hard and was never a familiar in the Strangers’ Bar. He spoke often in the chamber, and never hesitated to rebel against the party line if it conflicted with his personal views. The subjects on which he voted against the Blair government included the Iraq war, the privatisation of National Air Traffic Services, the establishment of foundation hospitals and the introduction of student tuition fees.
He had joined the leftwing Tribune group when first elected for Stockport North in February 1974, defeating the sitting Tory MP by 203 votes. In his maiden speech the following month, he briskly set out his expectations for the newly elected Labour government. As a Labour councillor on Oldham borough council for the previous decade, he was only too familiar with local housing problems and rehearsed the need for an urgent improvement in the quantity and quality of the nation’s housing stock, much as his successors are articulating in the current Commons.
In 1998, in another policy area where he correctly anticipated a significant problem, he drew attention to the failure of Ofwat, the water industry regulator, adequately to oblige the water companies to repair and invest in the infrastructure.
After boundary changes in 1983, Bennett became MP for Denton and Reddish, a new constituency containing some parts of his former seat. He stood down as an MP in 2005 and was succeeded by his former constituency aide, Andrew Gwynne, now MP for Gorton and Denton.
Born in Barton upon Irwell, a suburb of Salford, he was the son of William Bennett, a local government officer, and Elma (nee Francis), a schoolteacher. He was educated at Kings Road primary school, Stretford, and William Hulme’s grammar school, Whalley Range. Having graduated in economics, politics and sociology at Birmingham University, he became a teacher in 1961 at Mooreclose, Middleton, in Manchester, and in 1969 head of geography at Roch Valley comprehensive school, Rochdale, until his election to parliament.
He married Gillian Lawley, a folklorist whom he had first met aged 16, in 1961. Gillian died in 2023 and he is survived by their children, Kate, Matthew and Lee, by seven grandchildren and by Bronwen.
• Andrew Francis Bennett, politician and teacher, born 9 March 1939; died 15 December 2024
