Steve was a brilliant communicator, especially with Ministers, in a very unfussy way. He had an uncanny knack of seeming always to know exactly what they needed to know, and to be on the same wavelength as them. He was all over the detail of his area - there wasn't a thing he didn't know about highways maintenance - which meant that Ministers instinctively trusted him.

I always thought he and our then Minister Jesse Norman were such a good combination, and I loved the fact that they got on so well together. They were chalk and cheese in so many ways: Jesse was the archetypal old Etonian with his Latin phrases, and Steve was the salt of the earth plain-talking civil servant, but they clearly got on like a house on fire, and Jesse had a huge respect and admiration for Steve. I remember one occasion where Steve and I were both waiting in Jesse's outer office for a meeting to start, as Jesse's earlier meeting was overrunning. As the earlier meeting finished, Jesse came out with lots of rather stuffy-looking foreign dignitaries, and on seeing Steve his eyes lit up and he slapped him on the shoulder with a cheery greeting, and then said to the assembled company something like "I should like to introduce you all to my brilliant friend Steve here, the king of the pothole: this man is truly a legend in the world of highways maintenance".

He was a brilliant colleague and DfT is a much poorer place without him.