Mike George obituary

Mike George, a writer and campaigner on social justice and the environment, who has died aged 75 after contracting a rare form of tuberculosis, was instrumental in advancing ideas for socially useful manufacturing and in developing understanding of consumer vulnerability.

George questioned the assumption in the regulation of essential services that there were fixed groups of vulnerable people whose interests needed protecting. He argued instead that vulnerability could potentially affect anyone at any time for a range of reasons, including income pressures or illness, and he devised a risk-factor approach that is now standard practice.

His work for the Centre for Consumer and Essential Services at Leicester University heavily influenced the energy regulator, Ofgem, which in 2013 produced the first comprehensive vulnerability strategy in the essential services sector. Other regulators have since followed suit and it is now commonplace for providers of utilities and wider services to take proactive measures to identify people at risk, maintain registers and offer targeted help with bills and other forms of support.

George had long had a scientific approach and vision that put him ahead of mainstream thinking. In the late 1970s he was already advocating the manufacture of solar cells, wind turbines and road-rail vehicles by workers being displaced from the motor and defence sectors.

In 1978 he was appointed coordinator of the Centre for Alternative Industry and Technological Systems (Caits) at North East London Polytechnic (now the University of East London). Caits was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to further the work of the trades unions’ joint shop stewards committee representing workers at Lucas Aerospace, a major UK manufacturer, to consider how to manage the potential decline of their industry and avoid job losses. Under the radical “Lucas plan”, the committee proposed switching production from military equipment to products such as kidney dialysis machines.

George led the preparation of a 200-page report, Turning Industrial Decline into Expansion – a Trade Union Initiative, which set out detailed and costed proposals for the manufacture of 150 socially useful products. Although the report failed to win political or investor backing at the time, much of its thinking has since become orthodox and several of its ideas have been acted upon. There were no compulsory redundancies at Lucas.

After running Caits for 11 years, George turned to freelance researching and writing. He was a regular contributor to the Guardian from the 1980s to the 2000s. His articles for Society Guardian would typically focus on emerging issues below the media’s radar, and sometimes even beyond professional focus, such as hoarding, disabled refugees, the sex lives of people with a learning disability and rural mental ill-health.

This concern for marginalised people led George and his wife, Linda Lennard, a consultant on consumer policy whom he had married in 1983 after they met through his work at Caits, to reappraise the concept of consumer vulnerability. Lennard was already a visiting fellow at the Leicester centre and he became a research associate after they set up a joint consultancy in 2006. George led development of the risk-factor approach, arguing that vulnerability could be caused not only by individual circumstances but also by actions or inaction on the part of a regulator or service provider, and could arise from a combination of economic, environmental and social factors, termed intersectionality, identification of which might require providers of different services to pool their knowledge of customers.

In April this year, BSI, the business standards and improvement company, launched a new standard and kitemark for the energy, water and financial sectors that requires service providers to identify vulnerability through means including data collection and sharing.

Born in Brighton, Mike was the only child of Catherine (nee Symonds), a shopworker, and Ronald George, an engineer. The family moved to Hampshire, where he attended Cowplain county secondary school, Waterlooville, and then Purbrook Park county grammar in Purbrook. Following a short spell working in the chemicals industry, he moved to London to study psychology and zoology at North East London Polytechnic, graduating in 1969.

After a false career start in management with the Rochdale-based asbestos manufacturer Turner & Newall, which convinced him he would be better suited on the side of the workers, George left after four years to go travelling across the US and he then took a master’s degree in industrial relations at the London School of Economics. He joined Caits in 1978.

George held fast to socialist principles throughout his life, but left the Labour party during Tony Blair’s leadership. As a fervent environmentalist and a co-founder of the Socialist Environment and Resources Association (now Sera), he became involved in recent years with the Green party in St Albans, where he and Lennard had moved from north London. He campaigned particularly against air pollution.

While living in London, George and Lennard helped found the Hornsey Vale Community Association, which secured substantial lottery funding to take over disused local school buildings and adjacent land to create a thriving community centre and the award-winning Stationers Park.

George’s later life was blighted by illness. He endured two years of lengthy hospital stays until he was finally diagnosed by specialists at the Royal Free hospital in north London as having contracted BCG-Osis, a rare side-effect of BCG immunotherapy for bladder cancer.

Typically, George used his experience to pen a series of insightful and challenging blogs about health and social care from the recipient’s perspective. “Too often,” he wrote, “people’s actual experiences at the receiving end of services don’t figure half as much as they should in policy-making or service design and provision.”

George co-edited three books: The Politics of Nuclear Power (1978), Japanese Competition and the British Workplace (1984) and Developing the Socially Useful Economy (1986). He wrote unpublished poetry and performed with the Pennine Poets when he lived in Rochdale, where he also developed his abiding love for tramping the English countryside and being in nature.

He is survived by Linda.

• Michael Christopher George, writer and campaigner, born 14 February 1947; died 3 June 2022