It took seven times longer to fix the terms of Frank Field’s new job than for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to stitch their government together, the new chairman of the Review on Poverty and Life Chances said with a smile.

Unlike the novice coalition partners, who rushed to the altar over a long weekend, this is the second time around the block for Mr Field as the man charged with recasting our entire approach to poverty and welfare. This time he wants a happier ending.

In 1998 he was unceremoniously dumped as Tony Blair’s Minister for Welfare Reform after a bruising year of clashes with Harriet Harman, his boss, and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.

“The last time it was very vague and the assurance was, ‘Don’t worry, Frank, it will work out on the night’, and it didn’t,” he said.

Hence the weeks of negotiations with Downing Street about the scope of his role. He doesn’t like the term “poverty czar”, but can’t think of a better one.

Has he had any barbs from fellow Labour MPs about jumping into bed with the enemy? “No. One who was in government with me gave me a lovely hug and said, ‘I hope they treat you better than we did’. It won’t be hard.”

Indeed, he has so far had red-carpet treatment from the coalition machine. He has been given a room in the Cabinet Office, of which the always polite and mild-mannered Mr Field is mildly embarrassed because it meant turfing someone else out.

Jeremy Heywood, the No 10 Permanent Secretary, has offered some of the most senior civil servants to help in his task, although he plans to choose slightly less senior ones who are better able to attend regularly.

And he has an open door to half the secretaries of state in Whitehall. He has already sat down with Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, and Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, and envisages seeing some of them every fortnight.

The four bullet points on the official Downing Street press release that define his role as chairman of the Review on Poverty and Life Chances belie its scope, which is essentially to come up with 21st-century ideas to lift people out of poverty in fiscally constrained times.

A conversation with Mr Field quickly takes in 19th-century philanthropy, life in the animal kingdom and tough-love child-rearing — and it would be no surprise if all were in evidence in the report he delivers this year.

At its heart is a revolution in how we view, measure and tackle child poverty.

He makes clear that income measures, such as the current child poverty target, which sets the bar at 60 per cent of median earnings across the economy, will not be the basis of the new calculations.

The Government had got itself into a “cul-de-sac” over that one and Labour was moving away from this numerical target in its final months in office, he believed.

“They hinted at, and David Cameron has firmed up, the terms of reference for this job, that non-monetary aspects of poverty need to feed into the definition. This review is a continuation of what the Labour Government began but didn’t have time to complete,” he said.

Far more important than what a child’s parents earn is what opportunities does the child have, and can the young person take advantage of them?

“Amartya Sen, the Nobel prizewinning economist, has looked at a much more generous definition that has at its heart human potential. I would express it in much more mundane terms as an index of life chances,” he said.

Not surprisingly, having just started on his six-month review, Mr Field is short on specifics about what might be included in such an index. But work in his Birkenhead constituency on a guide to “five-star parenting” gives a few clues.

Parents, and crucially parents-to-be, want to know how to do it well, he believed, which prompted him to start work on the parenting guide.

“Why does the animal kingdom put such importance into nurturing? Might it be that we are more vulnerable in the first three years?” he asked. “There has been a loss of confidence in knowing what being a good parent is.”

Labour’s answer to children arriving at school without breakfast was to set up breakfast clubs. “Why not get parents to give them their breakfast? Getting your children to school dressed, fed and on time is one star in our model.”

When translated into a life chances index, that means points for children whose parents talk to them as babies, read to them as toddlers and have them ready to hold a crayon and sit still by the time that they reach school.

Much of this data is already collected in projects such as the Millennium Cohort Study of children born in 2000. Later on there would be points for educational progress and social skills.

Schools would have a role to educate the next generation of parenting through existing lessons — science or even in English literature.

Mr Field has rebuffed Tory attempts to get him to defect, but is in tune with some government ideas. Mr Duncan Smith supports much of this thinking about life chances being more important than monetary targets.

But will there be heavy opposition from poverty campaigners who say that there is value to numerical measures? Mr Field said he would not rule out having numerical measures, and his final recommendations could be a combination of a few, although “life chances” will be at the centre.

Tim Nichols, spokesman for the Child Poverty Action Group, said he was worried by these early signals. “We would be very concerned if the relative measure of poverty was downplayed.

There is overwhelming evidence of a link between economic inequality and social disadvantage. There is a tremendous amount of value in the current measure and target. It was set there after a lot of evidence showed it predicted outcomes of serial deprivation. It should not be dispensed with lightly.”

Mr Field also supports this year’s budget cuts. He approves of the way that each department is having to rethink its whole approach to spending.

Mr Cameron has taken something of a gamble in giving Mr Field his job. After the debacle of his ministerial career, it was unthinkable that the Birkenhead MP would get another job under Labour.

“At the end of the day I want not a report that thinks the unthinkable but that proposes the workable.”

That will be a judgment for the Prime Minister.

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