Mr Blunkett must hold his nerve and keep swinging his truncheon

What an unlikely three-way contest: David Blunkett versus the police officers versus the criminals, all of them battling it out with a clock ticking away. The Home Secretary needs to be the decisive victor before the next election, demonstrating to a sceptical electorate that he has got a grip on crime. Presumably the police share his desire to defeat the criminal, but first they want to defeat him. Standing between these warring allies are the criminals, unable to move for their stolen mobile phones.

This three-way contest is so big partly because the outcome will touch us all. Either we will feel safer at the end of it or we will not. It is also big because the dispute is emblematic of the Government's attempts to improve public services as a whole. The story of the Home Secretary, the police officers and the criminals is a story about the Government and Britain early in 2002.

Overall the level of crime is falling, but this is nowhere near reassuring enough when violent street crime in some areas is soaring. Similarly there are tangible improvements in a lot of primary schools, some secondary schools and some hospitals. But again, after decades of underinvestment and bloated, oppressive structures, that is nowhere near good enough either. As far as public transport is concerned, there has been no improvement at all. The state of transport is almost a crime in itself. So complicated is the current structure of the railways that it would be almost impossible to decide who should be arrested. Compared with sorting the trains out, catching the violent criminals on the streets should be a piece of cake.

But of course it is not proving to be a piece of cake, which is why Mr Blunkett was appointed to the Home Office – to sort it out as he did, to some extent, with the primary schools in his term as Education Secretary. He has moved fast, even faster than when he was at Education. Again there is a wider lesson from Mr Blunkett's impatience. Increasingly Whitehall is shaking to the words "Delivery, delivery, delivery". As well as the various delivery units in what frightened ministers call "the centre" – Downing Street and the Treasury – senior civil servants everywhere are being forced to adapt to the new mantra.

Here is one example. The brief of the new Cabinet Secretary, who will replace Sir Richard Wilson this summer, has been narrowed significantly by Tony Blair. The role will be dauntingly simple: to improve the capacity of the Civil Service to deliver better public services. This – far more than the overblown report about tensions between special advisers and officials – is the essence of that stand-off between ministers and Whitehall. After 18 years of opposition, with no sense of how government works, some ministers are still unsure how to get the best from the Civil Service. Following a decade or more in which complicated privatisations were the priority, cautious, risk-averse civil servants are adapting slowly to the new cry: make those bloody public services work.

Unfortunately the Government's worthy and underestimated obsession with the public services is matched by ongoing uncertainty about what it needs to do to improve them. One of the reasons John Prescott did not want to re-nationalise Railtrack in the first term was a real fear that the Government would get the blame if anything went wrong. To its horror the Government is getting the blame anyway. Still it presses levers and nothing much happens. To a lesser extent the same applies to the NHS. Ministers agonise over the genuinely awkward question: how to retain control of standards and give powers away to local hospitals? On the NHS they press levers from the centre and get into trouble for going near them.

On this, at least, Mr Blunkett is clear. He wants more levers to press. Recently he was criticised for saying that often ministers had "responsibility without power". The striking phrase was widely viewed as a minister trying to wriggle out of any blame. In fact he was being rather candid. For all the posturing, the almost silly Commons majority, the ridiculously large number of ministers speaking out in the never-ending political interview slots available to them, the Government often has responsibility without the power to match.

In his Police Reform Bill, the Home Secretary is seeking some power to go with the blame he gets every time there is a rise in crime. In particular he wants the power to impose higher standards on under-performing police authorities. He wields his truncheon threateningly because of the perverse variations in the performance of different forces. The more immediate cause of tension is over the new pay and conditions package. Some forces still function around five eight-hour shifts a week, as if criminals performed accordingly. The most effective police officers are not necessarily the most generously rewarded. It is those who work the overtime system most effectively.

On both the structure and conditions, Mr Blunkett is right to initiate reforms, as he was broadly right to raise standards in schools from the centre in Labour's first term. There is, however, a significant difference between Mr Blunkett and the teachers and Mr Blunkett and the police. The Home Secretary can sometimes seem stronger than he really is. He is only self-confidently robust when he knows that Downing Street is fully behind him. The "centre" is only robustly confident when there is a consensus of support for change. Mr Blunkett's current proposals are under attack from some police officers, from respected retired police officers, probably a majority in the Lords which is already tearing into his Bill, and from parts of the media. That is hardly the big tent of support that Mr Blair feels most comfortable with.

Already there is much talk of compromise in the air, especially over the pay and conditions package. More widely there is also a sense in some government circles that Mr Blunkett has not got to grips with his current brief with the same brutal focus he managed at Education. He suffered several defeats in the Lords over his anti-terrorist legislation. At the moment the Treasury still awaits his bid in the public spending round. It is three weeks late. The Home Secretary can hardly make the case to the Treasury that additional resources for the police have resulted in more efficient policing in the past. He needs an alternative argument in order to win more cash, and is not quite yet ready to present it to Gordon Brown.

Still, it would be bizarre if, on a rare occasion when a minister knows what he wants to do to improve standards in a vital public service, he were forced to retreat, leaving a policy vacuum similar to that of Stephen Byers. The Home Secretary should press ahead with his reforms, even if Downing Street gets a bit nervy. If he concedes much ground, the only victor will be the criminals. The biggest losers will be Mr Blunkett's political reputation and those non-criminals who still possess a mobile phone.