"I get nowhere unless the team wins," says Al Capone in The Untouchables, neatly summing up the ethos of co-production (and almost immediately letting it down through the judicious application of a baseball bat to a colleague's head).
Co-production, a radical rethinking of the connection between public service professionals and their clients, also has its roots on the streets of Chicago, though Capone would not have approved, born as it was out of a 1970s' police study that showed crime could be prevented more effectively with the support of the community.
People reported the low-level antisocial behaviour affecting their neighbourhoods and police dealt with it before it could escalate into more serious criminal activity, a winning relationship based on mutual dependency and respect.
Forty years later, the UK is finally catching on. Today, a report entitled The Challenge of Co-Production will be published. Produced by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the new economic foundation (nef), it is a rallying call for more focused public services based on this partnership principle.
"The old ways of trying to improve public services have been failing to improve outcomes and struggling to generate savings," argues report co-author Dr Michael Harris of NESTA.
He says politicians are already talking about co-production, but need to grasp the radical change it represents: citizens and communities transforming and rendering more effective not only public services, but the system itself.
That element of interdependence has been missing from the market-style approach to public services of the past decades, with the welfare state unintentionally creating an increasingly passive and disempowered public. The gulf between providers and users has only widened with the focus on targets and audits.
"Trying to improve public services, policymakers inadvertently created a greater distance between professionals and users," says Harris. "The crisis in the public purse means we need to improve services and save money. The only way to do this significantly is to find a new relationship with users, constructed so as to harness their capabilities and resources."
Imaginative and creative public servants
There are already several "imaginative and creative public servants and third-sector organisations" putting co-production into practice: the Learning to Lead programme sees children run certain aspects of the Blue School in Somerset; Taff Housing tenants earn credits for volunteering to deliver services for the housing association. The report aims to create a network for co-producers to learn from each other, and to build up skills, knowledge and capacity. This tool for reforming and improving public services will in turn challenge policymakers.
"The critical move is to get policymakers to learn from the experiences of those engaged in co-producing; and not only to commission co-produced services, but also to co-produce the commissioning process itself," says Anna Coote of nef.
Anna Coote
She hopes the report will usher in a new era in the British welfare system, and says co-production's considerable potential lies in the fact that tapping into users' knowledge about their needs and giving them more control over their lives produces better health and wellbeing. This will strengthen families and communities, and reduce future demands on services – needs will simply not arise.
"If co-production becomes a way of designing and delivering services then you're using resources you don't have to pay for through taxation: human resources, the core economy," says Coote.
Given the growing need to do more with less, co-production's promise of savings and improved efficiency could be a tailor-made response to the recession. But the main reason for its coming-of-age is that it is better for people: "It taps into unpriced yet valuable assets such as knowledge, skills, the relationships between people, allowing us to make better use of funds for safeguarding accident and emergency care, for example, things you can't co-produce or prevent."
Case study
Sam Hopley, chief executive, Holy Cross Centre Trust, London
Holy Cross Centre Trust was founded in 1988 to meet the needs of homeless people in the King's Cross area, a secular organisation whose primary work involves supporting mental health recovery and promoting the active participation of the homeless and refugees and asylum seekers in the wider community.
"Co-production gives a focal point and a vocabulary to work with our service users and volunteers, to facilitate self-efficacy, networking and bridge-building in ways that previous approaches have not achieved. Traditionally the sector has worked with excluded people in excluding ways. The core of the approach requires the unpicking of the power relationship between provider and user. Co-production challenges the notion that only one type of person gets to provide and the other use, and creates a dialogue – "we know that the experiences and skills that you have are valuable, will you share them with us and what would you like in return?" – offering to us a way of working that values each individual's unique assets.
"It follows that if we have invited or recognised contributions then that contribution needs to be valued. We use a version of time-banking as one tool to facilitate this interaction – so co-production is the model, time-banking is the mechanism. By involving people in our service in this way, and valuing their interests, time and skills, our members have achieved notable improvements in mental health.
Furthermore, a more effective service that draws on all of the creativity and energy has emerged, with our members showing that they have a vital role to play in the running of the organisation, improving the health of each other and the broader community. A key point is that our members have been able to attract a number of local organisations and businesses to the scheme. These organisations are able and only too pleased to offer our members reciprocal benefits simply by identifying areas where they have had spare capacity."
