Jonathan Ashworth has started carrying a card in his shirt pocket. It’s the licence his father was given when he got a job in the 1970s at the Playboy casino in Manchester. ‘It’s silly, really. But it’s just a reminder that my dad was able to start a job as a croupier from a very poor working-class background in Salford and that completely changed his life,’ the shadow work and pensions secretary says when we meet in his Commons office. It was at the casino that his father met Ashworth’s mother – a Playboy bunny girl working as a waitress. ‘Every week, the Playboy bunny girls had to queue up and had to be weighed by the head of the bunny girls. Isn’t that awful?’

Scales aside, Ashworth, 44, says his childhood taught him early on of the importance of employment. ‘The point is: they were working-class. I’m from a working-class background but these jobs meant they could do so much in life. They could build a home. They could start a family, they could even afford a package holiday to Torre-molinos in the early 1980s… Giving people a chance just opens so many doors. It’s why I am so angry that there is such a casual attitude to this. So many people are just being written off and not being given an opportunity to make the most of themselves.’

Ashworth is referring to the 5.3 million people in the UK who are currently on out-of-work benefits. The pandemic destroyed any progress the Tories had made in cutting the number, and while government talks about reform now, Department for Work and Pensions projections expect the disability benefit problem to get worse. A speech Ashworth gave at the Centre for Social Justice in January caused panic in No. 10 because he sounded like the Tories back when they attacked the Labour government ahead of the 2010 election – the last time the out-of-work benefit figures hit five million.

‘If you want to grow your economy and raise living standards and stabilise inflation, you’ve got to get more people into work,’ he says. ‘We have got an increasing number of young people who are out of work – 770,000 young people not in education, employment or training. This at a time when we have got a million vacancies in the economy, by the way. My worry is that this figure is going to grow, because the Centre for Social Justice, the Children’s Commissioner– and The Spectator – have warned that there are a number of children not in school who have disappeared from the school rolls. Some were teenagers. All the evidence suggests that being out of school at those key stages often means that you become out of employment when you’re older – so we are at risk of a lost generation here.’

The latest figures show almost 887,000 pupils are persistently absent from secondary school, more than double the pre-pandemic figure. ‘We are sitting on a big problem here, because unless we do something, we are going to see more and more young people out of work, which has devastating consequences for the rest of their lives.’

Ashworth is a Labour lifer; he even served on the front bench under Corbyn, although ‘there was no chance of winning – you didn’t have to be Mystic Meg’. He grew up with an alcoholic father but ‘coped with all this chaos’ by throwing himself into politics. He took a job at Labour HQ aged 21 and became a protégé of Gordon Brown. ‘I talk to Gordon quite a lot, yes. I talk to all kinds of people quite a lot.’ Is Ashworth one of the shadow cabinet members reported to be receiving lessons from Labour elders? ‘It’s not quite that,’ he says laughing. ‘I spoke to Patricia Hewitt recently. I think it’s important to get advice from people who have done cabinet jobs before. By the way, I don’t just talk to our side, I went for a cup of tea recently with [the former Tory adviser] David Freud to get his take on how we should reform.’

Ashworth says disability benefit would be reformed within the first 100 days of a Labour government. At present, welfare policy is decided nationally and implemented across hundreds of Jobcentres. Labour would shift this to a local level, enlisting help from the private and voluntary sector. ‘You could say to [mayors] Andy Street or Andy Burnham: “Help us with this group of people. You decide which private sector or voluntary sector organisations you should contract with to give people more support.” The idea that every-thing has to be done from a desk in Whitehall is completely wrong.’

It’s quite a departure: welfare reform is a tough task in politics because those making the changes are accused of being cruel to the poorest. Would this really be done more effectively by local government?

‘I use this metaphor, but maybe you can think of a better one – when Bevan created the National Health Service 75 years ago, he said he wanted to hear the clang of a bedpan in Tredegar ringing around his office. Well, at the moment, the dull thud of a stapler falling off a desk in a Jobcentre is heard in the secretary of state’s office. It shouldn’t be like that. There will be more, in certain circumstances, that can be done locally to help people into work. Local areas know what the local labour market needs.’

Will he be the one to deliver this change? If Ashworth is moved in the reshuffle, Labour’s welfare reform agenda may disappear. Ashworth says he’s in no hurry to go anywhere. The job is personal to him because he saw what happened when his mother became caught in a welfare trap and how work changed her life. ‘A good wage gave her a sense of pride, a sense of dignity and meant she could build the life that she wanted. That’s what I want for everybody else. That’s why I’m not prepared to just sit back and say, “Oh isn’t it terrible, all these young people, they are just going to have to keep signing on, there’s nothing we can do.” We’ve just got to do something about it.’