My friend Jeff Hollingworth, who has died aged 74, was a senior civil servant in the Department of the Environment. He was well known in environmental health and housing circles for his work on regulatory reform of housing renewal assistance in 2002 and his drafting, in the early 1990s, of a consultation paper on the licensing of bedsits and other houses in multiple occupation.
The proposals in his paper were blocked by the government at the time, but licensing eventually came into being with the Housing Act of 2004. Jeff was also involved, behind the scenes, in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, which introduced the concept of commonhold as an alternative to leasehold for flats and other properties.
Born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, the second son of Olive (nee Butts), a homemaker, and James, a local government officer, he went to Wintringham grammar school and then Manchester University, where he read economics. After graduating in 1970 he joined the civil service as an economist, later gaining an MSc at the London School of Economics in 1974, which he worked on part-time.
He switched to work on policy and administration, ending up as a principal civil servant, although he could probably have gone higher were it not for his tendency to be outspoken and to vigorously defend his staff when he thought superiors were in the wrong.
His first area of work at the DoE (and its successors) was on derelict land regeneration, and later he was at the Government Office for London, looking at policies to regenerate the East End. There was then a secondment to the London borough of Kingston, where he prepared a report on how tram systems could be provided in the area.
Always a popular speaker at conferences for environmental health officers, he could be charmingly indiscreet and, unlike so many civil servants, did not always play a straight bat. He was also unusually keen to leave the office and meet those affected by decisions taken in Whitehall.
Held in high regard by local government employees, who saw him as one of the good guys, he was a member of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health’s Commission on Housing Renewal and Public Health until he took early retirement at 58.
Afterwards he worked for Citizens Advice in Kingston for eight years, taking great pride in helping clients through the maze of local and national government bureaucracy, before spending time enjoying his allotment, walking, birdwatching and sampling good food and wine.
Jeff is survived by his wife, Ann O’Sullivan, whom he married in 2004, two children, Tessa and Adam, from his first marriage to Linda (nee Ross), which ended in divorce in 1995, and his brother Doug.
