Thinktanks call for increased co-production of public services, but warn of barriers

There continue to be major barriers preventing co-production from becoming a standard model for public services, a report by the New Economics Foundation and the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts has suggested.

The report, Public services inside out: putting co-production into practice, argued that co-production – public services that rest on an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and neighbours – could potentially deliver better, cheaper services “created from the ground up by those who know public services the best”.

However, it said: “Overall, the challenge seems to amount to one clear problem. Co-production, even in the most successful and dramatic examples, barely fits the standard shape of public services or charities or the systems we have developed to ‘deliver’ support, even though policy documents express ambitions to empower and engage local communities, to devolve power and increase individuals’ choice and control.

“We still need to answer a major question about how we can mainstream co-production, and to decide whether existing structures can be modified to enable it better, or if we need new frameworks.”

One of the major barriers, according to the report’s authors, surrounds commissioning.

They argued: “Co-production can be awkward for funders and commissioners, who tend to look for specific objectives and pre-determined outputs generated from a narrow range of anticipated activities and evidenced by limited indicators of success. Co-production looks much messier than this, often encompassing a broad and multiple range of activities which continue to evolve as relationships develop between professionals and people using services.”

The indicators of success for co-production involved broader outcomes and longer-term changes that fall across multiple funding streams, and are not always easy to measure, they said.

This “culture clash…..is bound to hold back the development of co-production”, the report argued.

Those involved with co-production of public services told the researchers of a battle to reconcile their objectives and ways of working with the demands of funders and commissioners.

Another major challenge for those involved in co-production is the difficulty in generating evidence of the value they provide. Capturing the wider effects “can be complicated and expensive and is rarely pursued by funders, leaving services to gather evidence at their own expense, if at all”, the report said.

NEF and Nesta concluded that introducing co-production as a mainstream approach to public services would require a structural shift away from hierarchical and centralised arrangements, and a cultural transition “away from delivering things to people, towards working with people to enable them to help themselves and each other”.

A copy of the report can be downloaded here.