Co-production: the crucial cornerstone of the Big Society

The emphasis on the Big Society over the past two days is, in many ways, enormously hopeful.  It puts people’s ability to make thing happen at local level at the heart of what the coalition is doing.  It also assumes an optimistic view of human nature and human capacity.

There are worries about how far it can go to change an unequal society, as my colleague Anna Coote has explained in her briefing paper on the subject.

My own reservation is not so much its ambition, it is its depth – and whether the Big Society has learned from what has gone before over the past three decades. 

It isn’t as if the last government didn’t try to make ‘citizenship’ more ‘active’.  We might argue about why they failed, but the fact is that they tried.

Any project on the scale of the Big Society must learn from that, and learn from all the multiplicity of projects, initiatives and programmes from forgotten governments gone by.  And the main thing they need to learn – and there is some evidence that they are learning – is paradoxical. 

It is this: to massively increase the reach and work of the voluntary sector, we have to use the public sector.

That is one of the key messages of the report we publish today with NESTA called Right Here, Right Now: Taking co-production into the mainstream, which explains how co-production – sharing the delivery of public services between professionals and users (and their families and neighbours) – can become the default model for public services everywhere.

The bottom line is that the infrastructure that underpins both the voluntary sector and the public sector is creaking.  The problem with the model where hard-working professionals and volunteers have to deliver services to grateful and passive needy people is that it leaves out the skills of those who receive – and who have an enormous amount to contribute.

Nor is it enough simply to cajole people out on the streets occasionally.  We have to shift the infrastructure to produce the kind of society we want, rather than hoping that – with enough rhetoric – it will somehow emerge by itself.

Co-production means that mutual support, in return for the help we get from professionals, is enormously equalising, can release huge new resources, can save money by preventing problems in the future.  It will also re-shape services from the inside.

There have been examples in the coverage of the Big Society that we are moving in this direction – the Liverpool museum which will open longer with the help of volunteers, the Cockermouth surgery which includes offices for volunteering organisations.

Those are starts, but they are not yet co-production.  They still assume this fatal split between the volunteers and the volunteered-to.  They still assume that volunteering is about giving and not necessarily receiving.

What co-production means is re-forging those bonds of mutuality between people, to provide them with the networks of support that they need.  That is a task which the voluntary sector can begin, but which only the public sector can complete.