Personalisation: Consumer Power or Social Co‐Production

Abstract

The policies of personalisation and choice have reawakened the underlying policy debates about the relationship between the ideologies of service reform and the implementation of policies that affect disadvantaged people. Service users themselves are responding through a range of initiatives that link self‐management, personal budgets, advocacy and the emerging aspiration for ‘co‐production’. By bringing together learning from a community of practitioners this paper identifies both the opportunities for partnership, including with multi‐disciplinary teams, and the threats of new forms of testing that have deep roots in social policy debates. In so doing it begins to identify the real choices that users, citizens and professionals now face.