Lord Herman Ouseley: Campaigner who said Bradford was 'in grip of fear' after 2001 riots dies aged 79

Ouseley’s report depicted Bradford as a city in the “grip of fear”, in which some Asian gangs considered themselves untouchable. In a passage that would not become received wisdom for another decade, he warned: “There is the fear of challenging wrongdoing because of being labelled racist.”

The report, entitled Community Pride Not Prejudice, had been ordered by Bradford Vision, a group formed by the council and other local organisations. Written in the months before the city exploded in violence on July 7 2001, it identified segregated schooling as a problem that had bred feelings of fear and mistrust between ethnicities.

“Different cultural communities believe they get nothing while others get all the benefits,” Ouseley said.

He had been commissioned to produce the report after stepping down from the Commission for Racial Equality. The then Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke had appointed Ouseley to chair the organisation in 1993 on the strength of his work running community cohesion groups in the London borough of Lambeth.

His signature achievement at the CRE – of which he later became executive chairman – was the formation of the group originally called Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football, which he launched with the support of footballers Paul Elliott and John Fashanu, as well as Gordon Taylor, chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association.

It was the first real structural change within football to take on a problem that had blighted the game for decades.

Herman Ouseley was born in British Guiana in 1945 and came to England in 1957, aged 11. He attended the William Penn School in Peckham and then Catford College, where he gained a diploma in municipal administration.

He later recounted his early experiences of racism growing up in Peckham. “At first I was unaware when insults came my way because the abusers always had a smile on their faces. It was more sinister when adults joined in,” he said.

Ouseley spent 30 years, from 1963, as a local government officer, serving as the first principal advisor on race relations within local government. In 1981 he was made head of the ethnic minority unit at the old Greater London Council, later becoming chief executive of the London Borough of Lambeth and the former Inner London Education Authority. As the first black person to hold such an office, he was responsible for more than 1,000 schools and colleges across the capital.

He was later a council member for the Institute of Relations, a think tank focused on challenging injustices and inequalities. He was also on the board of directors of the Manchester United Foundation and was a lifelong fan of United.

Ouseley was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1997 New Year Honours for services to community relations and local government and made a life peer in 2001, sitting in the House of Lords as a crossbencher until his retirement in 2019.

He is survived by his wife Margaret (née Neill), a teacher whom he married in 1972, and by a son and daughter.