The intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat was not "very substantial", former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott has said.

He told the Iraq inquiry he was "nervous" about the intelligence being presented in 2002 - some of which he said was based on "tittle-tattle". However, he said he did not have the knowledge to challenge the assessments. Nevertheless, he defended the military action taken as "legal" and said he would take the same decision again.

Lord Prescott, deputy prime minister between 1997 and 2007, is the last senior former Labour minister to be giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the war. The inquiry is looking at the UK's role in the build-up to the war and the handling of its aftermath, and is expected to publish its report around the end of the year.

In an interview in December, Lord Prescott expressed some doubts about the war. However, he told the inquiry that MPs had backed the action and that "democratic accountability had been satisfied". While former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had a "difficult decision" to make before deciding the war was legal, he said he accepted the judgement that military action was justified on basis of existing UN disarmament resolutions.

While it was "fashionable" to criticise Tony Blair for taking the UK to war, he said the former prime minister had "agonised" over the death of every British soldier. In his opening statement, he expressed his "deepest sympathies" to the relatives of the 179 British service personnel killed in Iraq.

Lord Prescott, the final witness in the current round of public hearings, said he attended 23 out of 28 Cabinet meetings which discussed UK policy towards Iraq as well as holding a number of private meetings with Mr Blair.

Asked about the intelligence shown to ministers about Iraq in 2002, Mr Prescott said had "no evidence" it was wrong but admitted he was a "little bit nervous about the conclusions on what I seemed to think was pretty limited intelligence".

"I got the feeling that it was not very substantial”
"When I kept reading them, I kept thinking to myself, 'is this intelligence?", he said.

Describing it as "basically what you have heard somewhere and what somebody else has told somebody", he suggested the conclusions drawn on the back of it "were a little ahead" of the evidence.

"So I got the feeling it wasn't very substantial," he said.

With hindsight, he said recommendations made by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) "were frankly wrong and built too much on a little information".