This time, of course, it may be different, but all too often, incoming governments feel the need to introduce public service reform White Papers, complains Dan Corry

When you sit in the centre of Government, inhabiting the hallowed – if rather pokey – offices at Number 10, you feel pressure the whole time.

Apart from the own-goals to look out for, the booby traps, the parliamentary ambushes, the internal squabbles, the unanticipated real-world events that descend on you, there is the constant feeling of a need to control the agenda.

Maybe it was different in the past, but in this century, the 24-hour news cycle and the incessant world of commentators and bloggers means that if you do not feed the news monster constantly, then someone else will – and it won’t be with stories that you wanted.

That then is the day-to-day experience. But there is another strange thing which seems to happen to those working in Number 10 tasked with bringing everything together. And that is to argue that everything you are doing is, in fact, all logical, coming out of the same world vision, the same set of principles, the same view of how the economy, markets and society works.

One outcome of this seems to be that every so many years, the prime minister of the day feels a need to publish a document, a White Paper even, to describe their public service reform agenda.

Tony Blair did it. Gordon Brown did it. Now, even Mr Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, are doing it. They are falling for the apparent need to explain themselves. And so we find ourselves awaiting yet another public services White Paper.

This has usually ended up being a strange and frustrating exercise for the authors, and the fact that the latest attempt has already been postponed several times suggests this run around the circuit will be no different.

The fundamental problem is in finding something of value that you can add to what you have already said. That is not easy. Take this Government. Whether you like what its members are doing or not, the Government already has an education policy, is fairly clear on the direction it wants to go, and is more or less getting on with it.

It has a policing policy, even if much of the implementation is still to come – police commissioners, et al. It certainly, and very publicly, has a health policy, even if we are all confused as to whether the current ‘natural pause’ is going to be used to change little, change a lot, or just change the language.

nd there is a general approach in public services towards getting rid of targets, guidance and inspection from the top – even if it now appears that what the Government really meant was that local people are to decide, unless what they want is not deemed to be good for growth. So, when you come to write your over-arching narrative on public services, there is a massive danger that when you look at what you have, it is all just a repetition of what you are already doing. And that leads to two dangers. First, to make something of it, you try to claim that everything you are doing flows from a set of principles – and experience suggests that governments always decide they have somewhere between three and 10 of these. In the Labour years these would have included fairness, efficiency, equality and empowerment. The Tory-led Government is bound to have Big Society and ‘localism’ in there somewhere.

The trouble is that in reality, you do different things in different public services, and you do so for good reasons. Different sectors have different characteristics and different needs. Their history is different. The money available is different.

And while the urge to shoehorn them all into the one framework provides great sport for policy wonks, it does little to expose much of value or to reveal hidden truths.

Indeed, it is not totally clear who this exercise is done for. It butters few parsnips with the voters. It may tickle the hot spots of a few commentators and intellectuals, but they are more likely to take issue with you than agree.

And that relates to the second danger. You sit in Number 10 looking at the first drafts of the much-anticipated – and delayed – public services White Paper and discover that... it says very little that is new or newsworthy.

So, your news colleagues panic and demand more. You push back on departments for something new – while they try to keep from you anything newsworthy for their minister to use at another time – and you even start to make things up.

Hence, crazy targets – for the number of academies, the percentage of GPs doing x, y and z by some arbitrary date, the reduction in paperwork or the participation of voluntary sector groups – are suddenly invented.

So, the whole exercise is all rather pointless and littered with dangers. Why then does it happen?

It’s a driving desire in Government to feel that you have a strategy, a plan, an intellectually-coherent view of the world that drives everything you do – that every small move in every department is not just a slightly random event responding to particular events and issues but part of a bigger story that all fits together seamlessly.

And, of course, some of this is true. The way that our votes make a difference is not just in the grand projects and directions the new government forges, but in the fact that every little decision is taken differently, depending on whether you have a Labour, a Tory or – supposedly – a Tory-Liberal Democratic Government.

So, maybe this time, its members will surprise us and the public services White Paper will be genuinely different. But if it is not, give a little thought to the poor guys who had to try to make it work!