Ideas: Citizens design and deliver public services

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Ideas: Citizens design and deliver public services

27.11.2009 // by Guest

This idea comes from Stephen Whitehead at the New Economics Foundation:

What's the big idea?:

Make citizens into co-producers and co-designers of public services.

Too often, the people that use public services are seen as passive recipients of state largesse. In fact, whether people are trying to take care of their health, find a job, or learn a new skill, it's their own efforts and abilities - together with their friends and family - that will make them succeed. Co-production means reflecting this reality by empowering citizens to work with each other and with front-line professionals like doctors and teachers to take charge of designing and delivering the services they need. By putting the people who use services in the driving seat - whether it's by asking expert patients to help design and deliver healthcare, or embedding a timebanking approach to enable people in a local community to spend time helping each other - co-production offers disempowered citizens - and front line staff - real power to change their day-to-day lives.

At the moment, co-production innovators are growing expertise in a number of public services in the UK. But by ensuring that the way that services are funded expects and rewards programmes which enable citizens to contribute, central government can spread this approach much further.

Why is this change important to you?:

Public services are at the heart of the relationship between the British state and its citizens. If we are to have a working democracy, it's vital that those public services are meaningfully accountable to the citizens that use them. But right now, the chain of accountability - from front line professionals, to managers, to civil servants, to ministers, to the electorate - is stretched to breaking point.

Real democratic control can be exercised by situating it at the place where citizens use service: in the classroom, the surgery or the community centre. By empowering the people who use public services to apply their own skills, knowledge and experience to the design and delivery of public services we can not only make services that work better, we can also ensure that control of those services is in the hand of the people who need it most - the citizens.