Co-production power-cut

By Michael Turner, Policy and Strategy Manager, Merton Centre for Independent Living

It’s old cliché but time does fly and it's almost a year since I left my co-production job at SCIE to join Merton Centre for Independent Living.

Most of my career has been about supporting the development of user involvement. It's a simple idea that when the people who use a service play a meaningful role in how it is run, it’s probably going to improve the service and make it more likely that it will give people what they want and need.

I've worked on spreading this message all over the country over the past 25 years. Literally from the depths of Devon to the Highlands of Scotland. I even worked briefly with Disabled people and services in Russia.

Not just a new word

During my eight years at SCIE, the word co-production came into fashion as a way to talk about this way of working. I thought it was a bit of a jargon word and I wasn’t that keen when SCIE first wanted to talk about co-production rather than user involvement.

But I was persuaded by the idea wasn’t just sticking a new name on the same old thing. For a jargon word to have meaning, it has to be linked to doing things differently, and that's where co-production comes in if it's done properly.

Real co-production is about services sharing power with Disabled people and professionals working together on a more equal basis. It has become a well-established way of working in organisations like SCIE and local authorities like Oxfordshire County Council and Hammersmith and Fulham - it's even in National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance and the Care Act, so it's almost part of the establishment.

Reality check

One of my first projects with Merton CIL was a review of adult social care in the borough. It was a real dose of reality about how social care works on the ground but there was real hope for it to be the first step towards improving the situation and the development of a co-production approach.

We're still waiting on this. Since we published the report the Council has stopped funding our Advice and Advocacy service. It's not been the great start to co-production we were hoping for, but we're now working on a review of housing and Disabled People in the borough. Co-production will be part of the message again so hopefully we'll have more luck this time.