Sandy Bruce-Lockhart was a likeable and influential Conservative politician, who, as chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), became one of the most powerful Conservatives in the country, staunchly and vocally defending the localist devolutionary agenda and returning it to the centre stage of politics. After three years at its helm he became the chairman of English Heritage in 2007.

Alexander John Bruce-Lockhart was born in 1942 in Wakefield. His father, John, was the deputy-director of M16. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, then at Sedbergh and the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester. After several years managing farms in Rhodesia — where he ran a workforce of 400, producing maize and raising cattle — and Australia, which, he said, “wasn’t as nice as Africa”, Bruce-Lockhart returned to Britain in 1968. He settled at Headcorn in Kent on a 300-acre fruit farm, growing apples and pears.

After two quiet decades on the land Bruce-Lockhart was thrust into politics quite suddenly and almost inadvertently in the late 1980s, as a result of the controversy surrounding the proposed Channel Tunnel rail link route, which was to cut through vast tracts of the Kent countryside. A desire to preserve rural Kent led him to try for the council and to make “some kind of contribution to society”. It was the start of almost 20 years of public service, first in local government and then, as head of the LGA, in national politics.

In 1989 he was elected county councillor for Maidstone Rural East, becoming leader of the opposition Conservative group in 1993 and, in 1997, leader of the council – which had an annual budget of £1 billion and 45,000 employees. It was a big-hitting role that occupied him for eight years.

Coming at the job with a degree of cynicism, he found, to his surprise, a well-run organisation full of, he recalled, “people of great integrity who had a genuine commitment to public service”. Aware of the chronic inefficiency of some local governance, on the one hand, and, on the other, the much undervalued commitment that imbued many of the volunteers who worked there, he set about reforms that focused the council’s attention on innovative programmes in care, education and policing. The latter included such initiatives as police-trained “community wardens” in 2000.

He was rewarded with a knighthood, in 2002, and then with the chairmanship of the LGA in 2004, when the Conservatives swept to victory in the May local elections.

His time in local government was not all plain-sailing, however. In 2000 he was on attacked for his hardline stand on asylum-seekers and his attitude to Section 28, when in July of that year he passed a policy that renewed the central premise of the controversial law that banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools.

As LGA chairman Bruce-Lockhart pushed unstintingly for more powers to be devolved to the local level, while battling also for further reductions in local bureaucracy, whether in the form of less targeting or simplified planning regulations. Such ideas increasingly became core Conservative policy. His influence within the party rose steadily throughout his years at the LGA to the point where the Daily Telegraph called him the 38th-most influential man in shaping policy on the Right.

But, despite his closeness to the Tory top brass, he was careful to remain bipartisan, in representing the interests of the councils of Britain to the Government. And he was comfortable with Labour MPs and Cabinet members, getting on well with Tony Blair and John Prescott. The Kent MP Ann Widdecombe described him as an old-style Tory patrician with a strong social conscience.

Bruce-Lockhart left the LGA in 2007, and became chairman of English Heritage. He described his enthusiasm for the new position and his modernising plans for EH in an interview in The Times published only last month.

Bruce-Lockhart is survived by his wife, Tess, their two sons and a daughter

Lord Bruce-Lockhart, OBE, chairman of the Local Government Association, 2004-07, was born on May 4, 1942. He died of cancer on August 14, 2008, aged 66