In This Together

This report tells the stories of people who are improving public services by working with the people who use them and delivering public services in a radically different way. It describes a range of practical projects and includes personal testimonies from individuals directly involved. These examples have at their heart equal and reciprocal relationships between professionals, people using services, their families and neighbours – an approach known as ‘co-production’.

Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.

- Boyle and Harris (2010)

Together, the examples here show the potentially transformative impact of co-production on all public services. At this time of upheaval within and around public services our stories suggest it is pointless to keep rearranging the furniture within each service silo. Instead, we should use this opportunity to rethink what public services are.

The people in our examples are working in different sectors and circumstances, and using different models. Nevertheless, they share a commitment to co-production and to the values that lie behind it.

Co-production challenges the traditional ethos of public services as things ‘done to’ grateful but passive recipients. It provides a positive vision of how people can play an active role in creating and sustaining better outcomes for themselves, with the support of professionals and their own social networks.

The stories express some of the reasons why this approach is powerful and how it can transform public services for the future. While earlier reports have documented the efficiencies and savings to be gained from working co-productively, this report goes further to offer inspiration to people who are thinking about how they can apply similar values and relationships to their own work.1 It offers encouragement to those at the frontline who have been trying to work in this way even where the system around them is pulling in the opposite direction. And it offers a challenge to public sector professionals, including those who work away from the frontline, to consider what they must do differently to create the conditions for co-production to become mainstream practice.

Our aim is not to encourage the adoption of specific models. These examples are not blueprints: each one has evolved in a particular local context. But all of them point to a shared set of challenges that must be addressed if we are to encourage much wider adoption and practice of co-production.

Key challenges include:

• Changing the way services are developed by mapping assets and resources as well as problems and needs; working with people who use services and the wider community to decide what services and support are needed; ensuring people involved with services have a role to play in determining and assessing their success.
• Changing the way services are delivered by engaging peer support as a core function; reviewing organisational roles to ensure service providers are accountable to the people and communities that use them; encouraging and valuing reciprocity within service provision.
• Changing the way professionals work by reviewing recruitment and appraisal processes so that they better represent what really matters to people using services; ensuring that building the skills and capacities of people to do things for themselves becomes central to the role of professionals; reviewing the language used by services to provide a truer reflection of the partnership between citizens and professionals; making personal relationships a critical aspect of a service not something to be fearful of.

These challenges are substantial but not insurmountable. Two complementary changes are required. The first is to change service culture by acknowledging that it is no longer the exclusive role of public sector workers to identify problems and provide solutions. The second is to reform the processes and systems on which modern public services rely – by developing appropriate commissioning and financing frameworks and by fully capturing social, economic and environmental impacts.

William Beveridge recognised that his model for a ‘Social Services State’ could eventually limit the power of citizens to help each other, marginalising activities that money could not buy. Co-production has the potential to restore the essence of Beveridge’s original vision.