Former National School head dies

Tuesday 27th January 2009 at 11:26

The former head of the National School of Government (NSG) has died, aged 51.

David Spencer, 51 – described as an impressive and witty man who was a pleasure to work with – died on Saturday January 17 after a nine-month fight against cancer.

His death comes a year after he left England and moved to Australia with his family to take up a new job in the private sector.

A memorial service was held in Berkshire, where the Spencer family still have a house near the school’s headquarters, on Thursday. It was timed to coincide with his cremation in Sydney.

Spencer joined the NSG in 2004, when it was still the Cabinet Office’s Centre for Management and Policy Studies. When he left in November 2007 – to become developer Lendlease’s global head of human resources – the national school had become a non-ministerial department, with a renewed focus on customers and a new academic arm in the shape of the Sunningdale Institute.

Mike Pearce, head of the school’s corporate governance, described Spencer as “instrumental” in setting the NSG’s current course. “He was a very impressive man,” Pearce said. “Highly intelligent, with an encyclopaedic knowledge on almost any subject you could mention, extensively travelled and extremely well connected.”

Pearce, who became friends with Spencer and his family during the years he worked with him, added: “He was very witty and had a mischievous smile which was never far from his lips, even in the most tense of situations.”

The mood at the school has been very sad since the news came from Australia, Pearce told Whitehall and Westminster World. “There have been lots of messages of support for the family, both from staff and from associates that he had come into contact with,” Pearce said. Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell has also written a letter to Spencer’s wife.

Members of staff were among the hundred or so neighbours and friends who attended Thursday’s service in England, and there are plans for a more permanent memorial to be placed within the grounds of the national school at Sunningdale Park.

Spencer’s wife and four children have asked that any donations in his memory be made to the charity that he chaired, the World Medical Fund - click on the link in our further reading section on the right.