Individual, Group or Collective Co-production? Personalisation and Day Centre Closures

Individualised budgets for service users are an increasingly popular mechanism for public service delivery. In England they are furthest developed within social care, but are now being extended to the National Health Service and beyond. They are part of a broader set of personalisation reforms which aim to extend choice and control to service users, improve access to universal services, invest in prevention and build social capital. One of the consequences of disaggregating social care funding into personal budgets is that users may withdraw their funding from building-based day services to spend on something else. Once some users do so, the service may no longer be viable for other users. With rising uptake of personal budgets, and a fall in local authority expenditure, many councils are decommissioning day services and closing their own in-house day centres. The closure of day centres for older and disabled people has generally been welcomed by advocates of personalisation, since such places are associated with the ‘one size fits all’ provision of the pre-personalisation era (Cottam, 2009). However it is unclear how far day centre closures are being driven by budget holders making new choices about their care, or are being done by councils to save money and drive users into more individualized forms of support. Following Brudney and England’s (1983) typology, it is possible to assesswhether day centre closures are stimulating more individual, group or collective co-production. Some individual co-production will be an essential part of personalised social care, as people undertake self-assessments, draw up support plans and make purchasing decisions. Group co-production, where users pool budgets to purchase services, is likely to be pursued by some budget holders, although may be limited to people with good networks of support. Collective co-production, in which the benefits accrue beyond the co-producers themselves, is consonant with the vision of citizenship offered by personalisation advocates (see Duffy, 2005), but may be hard to achieve as building-based day services close and people’s social contacts shrink. This paper draws on a national survey of day centre workers and qualitative interviews in three case study local authorities to assess the scale of day centre closures and the services which are emerging to replace them. It tests the hypothesis that individual co-production is becoming dominant, with some cases of group co-production, but with collectively co-produced activities remaining underdeveloped as insufficient attention is paid to sustaining shared public spaces. References Brudney. J.L. and R.E. England (1983), “Towards a Definition of the Coproduction Concept.” Public Administration Review, 43 (1): 59-65 Cottam, H. (2009) ‘Public service reform, the individual and the state’, Soundings, vol 42, pp 79-89. Duffy, S. (2005) Keys to citizenship: a guide to getting good support for people with learning disabilities, Birkenhead: Paradigm. Second edition.