News

Former Conservative leader of Kent County Council Sandy Bruce-Lockhart has died in hospital, aged 66.

Sandy Bruce-Lockhart

Lord Bruce-Lockhart, who had also been Local Government Association leader and English Heritage chairman, had cancer.

English Heritage, where he had been chairman for the past year, praised his "great contribution".

They credited him with securing "a major breakthrough in our plans for Stonehenge, convincing ministers that a new, affordable scheme was worth government backing".

Kent County Council leader Paul Carter said he would be "enormously missed" and described him as charismatic and "the leading architect of the transformation and improvement in local government in recent years".

He came to Kent in 1968 to farm, having run farms in South Africa and Australia, and said he was spurred into politics in 1989, by opposition to the planned Channel Tunnel rail link route.

Knighted in 2002, he was made a life peer in 2006 and took on the chairmanship of English Heritage in August 2007.

Lord Bruce-Lockhart leaves a wife, Tess, and three children.