Co-production in practice

The Cabinet Office suggests the following four areas in which co-production can be extended:

Choice and control: giving citizens greater control over resources by extending individual budgets and increasing the number of areas with budget-holding lead professionals.

Peer Support: empowering citizens to support one another with new rights for groups of service users.

Incentivising partnerships: giving greater weight to the quality of partnerships between staff and service users in performance management frameworks.

Professional Culture: ensuring professionals value citizen contributions by involving more service users in professional training, staff recruitment and inspection and supporting local leaders to drive culture change.

These recommendations would need to be part of wider reforms to empower citizens, foster a new professionalism and provide a more strategic role for government, particularly giving citizens better information, involving citizens more directly in policy making and commissioning for long-term outcomes.