Hazel Blears is very pleased with herself as I arrive in her office. She's just got a set of leaflets back from the printers, advertising a series of paid internships within Parliament. She's been working on this for a while, in conjunction with a dozen other MPs and the Speaker of the Commons, a project which will see a few interns actually getting paid for being at Westminster.
Some do already, but most don't. It's a long-running debate in Parliament because many believe that it's impossible to get a leg-up in national politics without mummy or daddy bankrolling you.
I put it to her that there's still a problem with internships, because to take on an intern and deal with all the payroll and national insurance hassle, you end up with paid interns getting longer stints than unpaid ones, so you can potentially end up giving one lucky person a major career bump, rather than giving lots of people a taster.
"These people come for nine months," says Blears, who agrees that the payroll and tax system surrounding paid internships is "so complicated". It's a matter for further discussion another time, but we're here to talk about wider problems with inequality in the UK, as a cross-party report by MPs is published which calls for radical rethinking about when and how the state should intervene in kids' lives.
We're meeting just after David Cameron's appearance in the Commons where he once again defended his handling of the Jeremy Hunt BSkyB row, and it turns out that while they don't agree on much, Hazel Blears does agree with Tory chairman Sayeeda Warsi's claim that the public aren't interested in this Westminster intrigue.
"They're interested in jobs and the economy, aren't they? And the NHS."
Under Labour's rule Blears was a government minister in several departments, before resigning in 2009, obviously sick of the stewardship of Gordon Brown. While it's largely unknown, she's credited for the "five a day" mantra on eating fruit and veg, which seems to have stuck beyond the demise of Labour. That, she says, was a project which needed cross-departmental support, and informs to a degree her work on social mobility, which she's keen to push.
Being non-partisan is, frankly, not something that's always sprung to mind when thinking of Blears, but she says she's quite enjoying it.
"I'll go in there and shout with the best of them, but if you want to get things done, and if you can collaborate, it's much more satisfying."
One of the most controversial aspects of the report is the idea that the government should be intervening a lot more in the lives of the under-3s, because they conclude this is the age where people's long-term prospects are really carved out. It's not a new idea - the coalition talked about it a lot when it was first formed.
Since then it's fair to say that agenda has fallen by the wayside, because there's no money. Blears thinks it's also because the idea of stepping into the lives of toddlers is politically difficult.
"I think politicians have always been nervous about crossing that line between what is a matter of public concern and what is family life. But there are risk factors, even among very young children, that you get different risk factors coming together, where you can predict they're not going to go into the right direction, and I've always believed that you should intervene. And this crosses all political parties.
"Some might say you risk stigmatising young children. My view is if you don't do anything, it's like watching a slow car-crash."
Early intervention, though, has always been about fishing young kids out of hostile environments created by their parents. What Blears and her fellow MPs seem to be calling for is for the notion of risk to be re-defined, to be far more preventative. Preventing toddlers from being stuck in a generational rut of under-achievement. And that carries accusations of nanny-state, which people often don't like. But these MPs seem to be suggesting notions of "risk" be quite radically altered.
"Much of that non-fulfilment comes from those risk factors," says Blears. "If children are not read-to when they're tiny, they're not going to gain those basic skills they're going to need to be able to get on life. If you believe in social mobility and aspiration, you need to equip all children."
It seems a big ask. The report released by MPs is a cross-party consensus identifying a clear problem - "uncontested territory", according to Blears. How does she account for 13 years of Labour rule, during which by all independent analysis social mobility slowed, before grinding to a halt?
"I think there were certain things that we did were successful, but obviously the shape of the labour market, if you look at it now, the opportunities for people to get on have reduced quite significantly. We got 42% of young people going to university, but equally some people would say that degrees became undervalued in terms of that degree to give you that ability to give you that next push on."
She won't judge the merits of one degree over another, and is more interested in looking at social mobility from a "life-cycle" point of view. It sounds esoteric, but one of the things which this report is good at doing is pin-pointing key moments in people's lives where things change. One of those, it's agreed, is a big collapse in attainment between primary and secondary school, particularly among boys.
There is a slight fallacy in the report - suggesting that boys fail to achieve at secondary school because they haven't learnt to read properly. Yet the targets and league tables suggest something else happens, because they've tended to perform well in primary school. It pinpoints a need for very big thinking, and it's not clear whether Blears, her fellow MPs or anyone else has the answer to it.
But for Blears the big trouble is that the arguments about deficit reduction and the economy within government are strangulating social mobility. While ministers - including Nick Clegg - argued a lot about the need to raise social mobility when the coalition was formed, that's fallen by the wayside as time has passed. She admits it's "grindingly hard work", but it needs to be put back into the central focus of Number 10.
"I think there is an issue - and I say this in a non-partisan way - about the lack of joined-up government, and I know it's an old phrase, but if you think about it, central government is far more siloed than local government. Government ministers are still judged by how big is their budget, there's no incentives in the system. Until you get shared budgets, you don't have a system of government which makes a lot of sense to me."
I ask her what she doesn't know about her own report - which sounds strange, but the report itself identifies half a dozen areas about the future for social mobility which are unknowns. Blears goes back to the shape of the labour market - the idea that we don't know what sorts of jobs we'll need the next generation to be doing.
"That is an area that really does need study. Knowing what the labour market is going to do over the next few years, and asking how do you ensure that people with skills and talent can take advantage of that. I worry about that a lot."