John Hutton

Eric John Hutton, planner: born Coventry 13 February 1928; Director of Planning, West Lothian Council 1953-69; Director, North East Scotland Development Authority 1969-79; OBE 1973; Senior Planning Inquiry Reporter, Scottish Office 1979-93; married 1956 Eileen Kennedy (died 2002); died Crieff, Perthshire 31 March 2003.

Brought up in the nursery of the planning department of Coventry City Council during their innovative period of post-war reconstruction, John Hutton went on to be the master planner of two important developments in Scotland. He oversaw the coming of British Motor Corporation's truck and tractor division to Bathgate, West Lothian, and then, as first Director of the North East of Scotland Development Authority, guided the development of the North Sea oil hinterland. Thereafter, he was a senior planning inquiry reporter for the Scottish Office, handling many of its most delicate and important cases.

Born in Coventry in 1928, Hutton was the son of the service manager of the Daimler car company, and lived his childhood in a specially designed Daimler house – his father had to entertain the company's customers and dealers. He was educated locally at Radford Primary School and then at Bablake, a minor public school, where many of the pupils were the technically gifted children of managers in the motor industry.

Called up for National Service in the Royal Engineers in the middle of his course at the Birmingham College of Art, Hutton thought that he owed it to his parents to earn his living on demobilisation and went to work in a junior capacity for Coventry Corporation planning department.

It was his great good luck that this was presided over by two remarkable men, the councillor (later Sir) George Hodgkinson and Sir Donald Gibson, City Architect and Head of Town Planning. Throughout his life Hutton would refer to the debt that he owed both of them for the personal interest that they took in the development of their junior colleagues.

Post-war Coventry, and its capacity to tackle problems, left an indelible mark on Hutton. After a fleeting period working on promotion for Warwick Council (1951-53), he became the youngest Director of Planning in Britain country when he joined West Lothian in 1953.

David Morrison, later to be the chief executive of West Lothian Council, remembers Hutton as an outstanding planning officer:

The shale-oil industry was in rapid decline, and we owed it to the shale-oil workers to find suitable jobs for them and their family. Hutton played a vital role in the choice

of Bathgate as the Scottish destination for the motor industry promised by Harold Macmillan. He laid the foundation for a factory which was to become the biggest single concentration of machine tools under one roof in Europe. He also was instrumental in persuading Hewlett Packard, then a relatively small firm based at Stanford University in the United States, to alight upon South Queensferry in West Lothian as the major location for their European operation.

Bill Hewlett, on the occasion when he and I laid the first sod of the factory in 1962, paid special tribute to the excellent and imaginative work of Hutton and his department. Hewlett, a member of President John Kennedy's Science Advisory Council, was not a man to bestow praise unless it was merited. And I know from first-hand contact with him that Dave Packard regarded Hutton and his team as one of the reasons why the factory continued to grow so smoothly. Keith Sinnett, the first manager of the Bathgate truck and tractor division, said that, whatever problems he may have had with Scottish workers who were not used to the motor industry, the co-operation and imagination of West Lothian Council were second to none. Hutton had a large part in this.

In April 1969, reluctantly, he left central Scotland for Aberdeen to become the first director of the North East of Scotland Development Authority (Nesda) in order "to be in on the ground floor" of North Sea oil developments. It was Hutton's idea that in 1972 Scotland should set out an exhibition in Houston, Texas, which was then, as now, the world centre of the oil industry. He established worldwide contacts and became not only an OBE but an honorary citizen of the Lone Star State. His genius was to persuade a number of organisations who traditionally didn't care for one another, the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, the City Council, the Aberdeen Trades Council and the county councils of Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire, to work together.

His 10 years bore much fruit and saw not only the orderly development of the oil industry but the establishment of smaller enterprises to take up the slack when nearly 2,000 jobs were lost at the British Rail loco works at Inverurie. In 1979 he told me that his instinct was yet again to move on and he became a planning inquiry reporter at the Scottish Office.

Many planning inquiries seem to be interminable but Hutton gained the reputation of a certain expedition combined with thoroughness, which saved both firms and the state a considerable amount of money. He was a quiet, self-effacing professional.

Tam Dalyell