Lord Northfield - Telegraph With a grounding in animal research, Chapman was also a campaigner for animal welfare. In 1953 he persuaded the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, to regulate the trade in horses from Ireland for slaughter after seeing some almost unable to stand. He exposed the illegal slaughter of horses in sight of dead carcasses, called for a winter pause in exports of ponies to Canada because of rough conditions in the Atlantic, and in 1959, with a Conservative colleague, complained of ill-treatment of a fox by the Southdown Hunt. In 1976 Northfield brought in a Bill to manage deer herds and combat poaching. He fought Hemel Hempstead in 1945, going on to serve as a Cambridge councillor and secretary of the city Trades Council and Labour Party. He joined the Fabians as research secretary in 1948 and the next year, at 25, became general secretary. A major task for Chapman was producing, with Hugh Gaitskell, two volumes of essays on current issues to demonstrate that Labour had not exhausted its capacity for "creative thinking." Handing over in 1953 to Bill Rodgers, he reckoned his greatest contribution was to save the Fabians from insolvency. Chapman was elected for Northfield in 1951, replacing a Labour MP who had quit the party. A bright political future was predicted for him, but he soon could not afford to become a minister. He opened a hotel at Rottingdean, run by his mother, then built a property business in Brighton. When Harold Macmillan introduced life peerages in 1958, Chapman tried to use the legislation to reform the House of Lords itself. Under Labour he chaired the Select Committee on Procedure, and the sub-committee on a new parliamentary building in Bridge Street (built three decades later as Portcullis House). Chapman stood down at the 1970 election, with a re-elected Labour government expected to appoint him a High Commissioner. Its defeat left Chapman to concentrate on his business interests. He took a two-year fellowship at Nuffield College Oxford, writing two books supporting British membership of the Common Market. He then became a visiting Fellow at Sussex University's Centre for Contemporary European studies, and from 1978 to 1984 a special adviser to the European Commission. His first public appointment, in 1974, was as chairman of the Rural Development Commission; over six years he pressed for greater funding for deprived rural areas of England. In 1975 Wilson made him a life peer. His expertise in property and connections with Birmingham - from where many of its people and businesses came - made Northfield an apt choice for Telford, which by his appointment in 1975 was nearing critical mass. He presided over the new town's growth for 12 years, offering Margaret Thatcher his expertise to help tackle tension and decline in the inner cities. Northfield from 1986 chaired Consortium Developments, a house-builder which planned new communities around the M25. He was also for a time a director of Wembley Stadium. Donald Chapman, Lord Northfield, born November 25 1923, died April 18 2013