That was the career change facing Hilary Armstrong last May, when she was moved from being Labour's chief whip to take up the new Cabinet Office post of social exclusion minister.
She says the job was created in response to recognition that Labour's social exclusion work had reached a turning point. Since coming to power the Government has tried to tackle social exclusion by developing high-level policy in the Social Exclusion Unit, and then handing the implementation over to government departments.
Armstrong says this has worked, the clearest indicator being that the bottom two-fifths of society have increased their income by proportionally more than the top three-fifths, but that there is still a core group that isn't being reached. Her job is to change this.
"The Prime Minister felt we needed a post that would concentrate on the most excluded groups, and then work with departments on how mainstream services can be reconfigured, and what incentives can be put into the system to change that performance," she explains.
Among the excluded groups Armstrong is initially focusing on are pregnant teenagers, looked-after young people and the mentally ill. On teenage pregnancy she is working with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) on a revised version of its teenage pregnancy strategy, which she hopes will be published in the "early autumn".
"Overall we've got about an 11 per cent drop in teenage pregnancies," she says. "But that figure masks some huge differences. In some areas we are still seeing rises in teenage pregnancy rates."
The DfES is analysing data from different areas to find out what has been effective, and what has not. Once it has completed the work, Armstrong's role is to get other departments to support the programmes that have been found to be most effective.
She is also working with the DfES on its forthcoming green paper on looked-after children, and is involved in the work the Home Office is doing on dealing with problem families as part of its respect agenda.
Another group she is keen to improve services for is the mentally ill.
"We want to see if we can get the voluntary sector to work with them in ways that will help them to stabilise their lives," she says.
There are also broader themes to the Government's social exclusion work.
It is keen on early intervention - which Armstrong says can mean early years - and has its ongoing drive against child poverty. Armstrong insists the target to eradicate this by 2020 can be met.
Another key group is young adults, whose needs were identified in the Social Exclusion Unit's Transitions report. She says work is carrying on with this, despite the closure of the unit, but adds: "I can't promise we are going to do everything in the first year."
Moving from chief whip to social exclusion minister is not Armstrong's first career change. She worked in social work, then community work, and was a youth and community work lecturer before going into politics. Despite this, she says the same things have always driven her.
"We too often write people off, and don't give them the opportunity to be what they could be. That is a cost to them, but it is a cost to us as a society too," she says. "The values that took me into community work, social work and politics are what drives us now, and what drives the Government."
FYI
- The Social Exclusion Unit was set up in 1997 at the Cabinet Office
- It moved to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2002
- Last month Armstrong announced that it would close, and launched a Social Exclusion Task Force, based at the Cabinet Office (YPN, 21-27 June, p4)
- The Task Force consists of former unit members, and members of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.
