The New Economics Foundation published a report explaining that co-production means something very specific. It means the equal partnership between professionals and clients - not to consult them more, or get them to sit on boards, but to use their skills to deliver services. ... The difficulty is that co-production is an awkward term and is used increasingly loosely by policy wonks to cover almost everything from being a bit nicer to patients to the current catch-all solution, personal budgets.

Of course, clients often know best what priorities they have and how the money allocated to them should be spent. But if all public services do is give clients a budget and tell them to get on with it, it flies in the face of the basic ideas behind co-production - that people need to be rooted in mutual support networks, and that not everything can be bought."

"The charity In Control makes a similar distinction between individual budgets and what they call "self-directed support", in which money is just one asset that people can draw on. It is vital, but it isn't enough. Those who advocate only individual budgets risk flinging clients into a world of isolation, where they can be alone with their budget, where they might be forced, for example, to spend some of that scarce money on buying people to keep them company - like the engineer Mike Hammond, who advertised in April for someone to take his father to the pub twice a week at £7 an hour.

If there was some kind of genuine co-production infrastructure in place, Hammond's father could have got the companionship he needed and kept the money for something else. Using a time banking approach, he would also be encouraged to identify how others in his community could use his skills and support. Personal budgets were never intended to cover every aspect of people's lives, to replace relationships with market transactions. But when they are used by policymakers instead of rebuilding social networks, this can be the outcome: the recipients will have less money and less confidence than before.

By themselves, the budgets entrench the ineffectiveness of the consumer model of care, encouraging users to "buy solutions" rather than have an active stake in delivering their own. If public service modernisation is about "efficient" professionals delivering narrow units of help to passive clients, or just gives people budgets and sends them away to fix themselves, it is hardly surprising that demand mounts and costs spiral out of control.

If, on the other hand, we can redefine public service clients as assets who have skills that are vital to the delivery of successful services, then we have a way that public services can start to rebuild the neighbourhoods around them. The point is that there are some services, like friendship, which friends provide very much better than professionals. 

Co-production is about broadening public services so that these human needs can be met. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/16/longtermcare)

Last updated on September 21, 2011 by getavision admin