Until Saturday evening I was a junior minister at the Treasury, spending my time – as readers of last week's column will remember – preparing for Parliament's return this week by mugging up on the various pieces of Treasury legislation I was involved with.

Then at 8 p.m. on Saturday, when I was just celebrating having got the children to bed with a (little) glass of wine, my mobile phone went and it was the switchboard at 10 Downing Street telling me to be on standby for a call from the Prime Minister.

When it came through, a few minutes later, he said he was moving me across to the Department for Work and Pensions, with immediate effect, to work on aspects of benefits policy connected with the welfare to work agenda.

While obviously being sad on a personal level from leaving colleagues in my old job that I had enjoyed working with, this is also a great opportunity.

It's a chance to ensure the actions of government are as good as they possibly can be to support families and individuals as they try to get on in their lives. I'll be particularly focusing on the role benefits policy has to play to help us meet our ambitious target of eradicating child poverty by 2020, along with an important review of the housing benefit system and looking at whether we can improve the way the social fund works to provide crisis and budgeting loans to people in times of acute need.

All of this is probably more relevant to the lives of normal people up and down the country, including in Burnley, than my previous job as minister for the City so I'm pleased to have the chance to play a part in policy areas that could perhaps really make a difference to the people I have been elected to represent. And, of course, I'll still be working out of the Burnley office and holding surgeries every Friday when I don't have to be in Westminster to vote.

So the return of Parliament on Monday saw me going into my new office at the Department of Work and Pensions to meet the new teams of civil servants and start the process of getting briefed up on the top priorities for the job.

Before all that happened, I had, of course, been in the constituency last Friday, holding a surgery at the charity arch in Burnley centre.

We had a good turnout and I also enjoyed chatting to passers-by in between customers.

That afternoon I went to the St Peter's Centre to meet some of the volunteer sports coaches who provide training for children on an excellent programme run by Burnley Council with support from the National Lottery.

It's a great system: young adults who enjoy sport are trained to become coaches for school age children, dramatically raising the amount of people engaged in sport in our communities and also taking children off the street at the same time.

Around 70 volunteer coaches have come through the system this year alone on the scheme and the National Lottery has said it is using Burnley as an example of how successful schemes can be run.