Blunkett - tipped for Home Office

The first weeks of a Labour second term will be dominated by initiatives on welfare, health, crime and education, it has been revealed.

Heralding a "sea change" in Whitehall, Tony Blair is set to announce a new "Ministry for Work and the Family" to spearhead a drive to eradicate the "twin evils" of child and pensioner poverty.

The new ministry will take over responsibility for employment from what will become the Department for Education and absorb the Department for Social Security.

Likely to be headed up by Alastair Darling, the new administration will continue the linkage of benefits to work-based schemes and will set targets to achieve full employment, "end" pensioner poverty and take one million children out of poverty.

A centrepiece of the new department will be a commitment to ensure by October that all families with children and at least one working member will earn at least £225 a week.

According to speculation, the education secretary, David Blunkett is set to move to the Home Office. His successor is tipped to be the current schools minister Estelle Morris.

She will have the task of pushing through sweeping reforms of the secondary school system, doubling the number of specialist schools and allowing successful schools greater freedom from the national curriculum.

While pledges to improve the teacher/pupil ratio will be popular with voters, Morris will face stiff opposition from teaching unions, already unhappy with the workload of teachers, which are concerned about the rise of a "two-tier" education system.

At the Home Office, which may become a "Ministry of Justice" during a Blair second term, Blunkett will oversee a crime bill in the Queen's Speech giving victims a "bill of rights" - including a say in court and consultation on the offender's punishment.

The Queen's Speech is expected on June 20 - after MPs are sworn in following Thursday's general election.

Blunkett is also expected to give "strong" backing to Lord Justice Auld's report on reform to the criminal justice system - already trailed in a Home Office document.

He will also have to make progress on scrapping the right to a jury trial.

The Queens Speech is also expected to contain a health bill giving the government a mandate to deliver hospital reforms.

Alan Milburn is expected to stay where he is to push through a "modernising" heath agenda that will be centred around controversial proposals to give the private sector a greater role in public health service provision.

Following the foot and mouth outbreak the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food is to be split - separating producer and consumer interests.