Public administration has never been the glitziest or most immediately attractive discipline to study. With this in mind, the government’s announcement that it intends to establish a new National School of Government and Public Services (NSGPS) – in-house training for civil servants – is easily overlooked as little more than administrative tinkering in a world beset by uncertainty and turbulence.
And yet to see this announcement as little more than peripheral politics would be wrong: it matters. Since the previous National School of Government was abolished in 2012 (and the Civil Service College abolished in 1995), the UK has struggled to ensure that its public service professional development and support structures are fit for the future.
This is necessary if the UK is to build an inclusive economy, deliver its industrial strategy, deal with its “productivity puzzle”, and manage those issues that now sit within the UK’s National Risk Register (such as the threat from extreme weather events). More generally, if it is to escape the dominant “broken Britain” doom-loop narrative, then it needs to radically rethink how it supports politicians and officials across different governments and at all levels of the UK to govern effectively. This is why the creation of a NSGPS matters.
