Co-production in local authorities: ‘We need to put our money where our mouth is institutionally’

What co-production approaches have worked well in local authorities?

1. Meeting people where they are

So it’s all about really listening to people, and going with a very open mind and sort of trying to reach those hard to reach groups as well, that aren’t the usual suspects, not the sort of people that you always find in sort of partnership boards. We work closely with [organisation], and with a multitude of integrated neighborhoods as well. So there’s plenty of channels for engaging with people. But we’ve been going out to the community, and going to things like knit and natter sessions, where we can find older people, faith groups, some independent living services, talking to managers and having them invite residents along to sessions that we’ve put together.

 2. Adopting a strengths-based approach

It is all about having conversate meaningful conversations with people and we adopt the appreciative inquiry approach* that you may be aware of. And it’s just a few questions, usually lasts about an hour with an individual. And it’s to focus on the positive as a kind of strength based approach to what’s working for them and what they’d like to see more of, and also, of course, trying to identify what some of the gaps are. And so as a local authority commissioning team in adult social care, we’re trying to find out what the gaps are so that we can design services that meet those, those needs, those unmet needs. In a nutshell.

*(an approach to organisational change that focuses on strengths rather than on weaknesses)

3. Listening to clients

So I’ve been spending a hell of a lot of time with clients, trying to find out what’s working for them, what’s not working for them, which is surprisingly easy to do. Because I tell not long ago, I was a client myself. So they’ve employed me pretty much straight out of their service to work in their service. And I’m gathering a lot of feedback and trying to get it back to managers as sort of unfiltered as reasonably possible.

4. Meeting the needs of everyone involved

So one of the tasks that was set me when I started was to set up an engagement board. So when the council has like, strategic consultations that they need to do with local communities, there’s a group that they could reference and get to feed into those consultations. And that for me felt like a little bit one sided. So I was thinking, you know, what do people get for taking part in in something like that? So thinking about bringing people together to kind of like, co-produce what that might look like? How do we work together with communities in the voluntary sector, to create a space where the council can get their needs met around consultations, but also that there’s a space where people can come to us about the things that are important to them?

5. Producing and distributing co-production resources

[Local Authority] have just produced kind of guidelines around co-producing with people. So they’ve actually got a document and a resource that’s gone out to all departments and things like that, which having looked through, it was fairly impressive, which was good

What are the challenges to co-production that local authorities are facing?

1. Practical issues such as finding warm spaces

I mean, at the moment it is finding space for things like night shelters, it is finding space for like outreach café. So yeah more spaces and to be honest, heating those spaces at the moment.

2. Letting go of power

People feel quite disillusioned with working with councils. And I think like voluntary sector haven’t always had positive experiences. So it’s kind of like, looking for ways to like rebuild trust, and kind of show that it’s genuine, and that something will happen that will be positive at the end of it. I think the internal struggle is letting go of power. So, councils are very used to holding power. And it’s saying, actually, if you’re gonna go into a piece of co-production, you want a kind of blank sheet approach, and go into it, not necessarily knowing what the outcomes are. And I think that makes people nervous.

…the power thing, there’s lots of stuff going around in terms of engagement and consultation, but not necessarily co-production, not necessarily having people at the table when decisions are being made. You know, it’s almost like the decisions already been made. Let’s go and ask if people like it kind of stuff, which is, that’s not co-production.

3. Working out payment processes

Some of the challenges that I know have come up, both within my role of sort of doing the work I’m doing, but also for other people is just some very practical things around bureaucracy and around processes and things, just things like repayments and stuff, you know, people being renumerated for what they’re doing, should be a fairly simple process should happen quite instantly. But if it’s part of a council process, it’s like right, you have to sign up to this, and then it has to go to HR, and then it has to go here and you might even have to be on the payroll. It just gets very complicated. And that’s not to say it’s not workable if you see what I mean, but it’s just I think when we’re trying to engage people kind of in the moment when they’re ready, and then we kind of go, we might give you something, but it might take about six weeks for it to get, and you might have to fill in all these forms and go through it. So I guess there’s some things around just the processes in the bureaucracy in local authorities that can hinder true co-production happening.

What are the solutions to barriers of co-production?

1. Buy-in from the top

So I think a really important thing, right from the outset, is to get commitment from senior leaders in your organisation, the people right at the top, that this is the way to go. And there needs to be a proper commitment to making a co-production work. What you find is that once they’re on board, and they can see the rationale and the benefits and so on, you get a lot of those barriers removed, because, you know, if you’re asking for an invoice or a document or a PO number or something to be able to pay someone for their time, having participated in a panel and you start getting bureaucracy in the way of things, you’re then able to escalate it and say, look, we need to be clever about this and we don’t need to keep service users waiting or experts by experience waiting, so let’s just get it sorted. And then if an email comes from the top saying, let’s just push this through, then you get their buy in is so important because when it’s individual teams or individuals trying to do it at a sort of grassroots operational level, you do come up against those barriers within the organisation. And that’s certainly been my experience. But when there’s buy in right at the top, it’s normally easy to escalate and get things resolved more quickly.

2. Make use of third-party and partner events

So these days, it tends to be less about one organisation and more about organisations coming together. So with the new structure we have integrated care systems and integrated neighborhoods, which correspond to sort of wards, divisions, cities, if you like, it’s much easier to get a group of people around the table, from different organisations. So you’ve got representatives for charities, you’ve got community nurses from PCN’s, so you’ve got people with lived experience and local authority colleagues all around the table. And so I would say, don’t try and reinvent the wheel, but listen to people that have been doing this stuff for years and know what they’re talking about. And, you know, don’t assume that, that there’s no knowledge out there. And we have to go out and discover things for ourselves make use of the existing networks, and also make use of third party events. So our experience in [area] has been with a very limited budget, we’ve been able to basically go along to events being organised by other parties and other teams, where we know there was going to be a good turnout of older people in our case, because that’s the target audience for our project. Rather than setting up our own event, because if people are going to be somewhere anyway, then there’s multiple partners there, you know, it makes sense. We did set up our own co-production events about a year ago, and they were very poorly attended. Because there wasn’t enough of an attractor, there wasn’t enough of a pool, you know, just saying come along and talk to us wasn’t enough. Whereas if it’s an event where there’s lots going on, and lots of different partners they can talk to, it’s a much more interesting space. So definitely, I would say make use of third party and partner events rather than try and do all as sort of own branded engagement or co-production events.

3. Be transparent, give feedback, show respect and build trust

…feedback that we’ve had from the communities is that they feel like, I think one of the phrases was ‘mined for information’. So it’s like you come in, you excavate people’s kind of like how they’re feeling about things, and then you disappear. And then because of the bureaucracy and council process, and everything takes time, people don’t hear and they don’t know what happens. They don’t know what happened with all the information they shared. Because it can be such a long time until actually things are kind of put together and happen. So I think, I think feedback in terms of just it just being a respectful thing to do when you draw information from somebody, but also for building trust is really important. And I think, I think you mentioned as well like that transparency, and how long processes are going to take. So if it’s gonna take six months before somebody gets feedback, then as long as they know, they know what to expect.

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