Here's a Minister for public service transformation: "If anything, history says we have gone too slowly. We need to keep up the pressure for change, and leave open the right to come back and ask questions again." Unexceptionable sentiments, you might say. But this isn't Tom Watson, the IT enthusiast who holds the reform portfolio in the Cabinet Office, nor is it even his shadow, Francis Maude, the former chair of the Conservative Party. The quote comes from an interview I did with Stephen Dorrell in summer 1994 when he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the John Major government charged with public service reform.

I concluded the piece identifying him as a man on his way up - which was true in the short run as he became Secretary for Health, but in the longer run, it was a bit premature, as he left the Tory front bench in 1998. The point of this bit of history is that transformation, perhaps under another name, has been tried before. Public service reform long antedates the Labour government elected in 1997. It has gone in fits and starts, it has had recapitulations, repeats and long pauses. That back story leads to two related questions that need to be asked about the capital transformation project inaugurated by Sir David Varney's report to the Treasury in 2006 (the report can be found at www.hm-treasury.gov.uk). The first question is whether his scheme is just another initiative, a cousin (or stepchild) of the Citizen's Charter, market testing, outsourcing, commissioning and all the other reforms of recent years, or something special? Cynical civil servants would be inclined to think that the clouds will always pass and the Cabinet Office will get yet another minister (how many ministers with 'public service reform' in their title have there been since 1992?).

The other question harks back to Dorrell and queries where transformation fits in the political cycle. It wasn't quite Year Zero when Tony Blair succeeded Major in 1997, but ministers rarely (or rarely openly) built on schemes of reform started by their predecessors, even though, in health, education and public services at large, they soon arrived at a remarkably similar analysis to their Tory counterparts and, branding aside, their prescriptions borrowed heavily on what had gone before.