Co-production in Public Consultation: How to Share Power Without Losing Accountability

Public bodies have long struggled with a fundamental tension: how to meaningfully involve the people they serve in shaping decisions, without ceding the accountability that democratic governance demands. Co-production offers a compelling answer, but only when it is done honestly, with clear rules and real power on the table.

What Co-production Actually Means

Co-production is not another word for consultation. It is a governance stance in which people with lived experience contribute to defining the problem, designing options, testing them, and shaping how they are implemented. The Social Care Institute for Excellence describes it in terms of sharing power through partnership working, centred on equal partnership, valuing assets, and reciprocity. The NHS England statutory guidance goes further, stressing that genuine co-production requires cultural change, with professionals becoming genuinely comfortable sharing resources, responsibility, and power. That cultural readiness is not incidental. If the decision-makers sponsoring a co-production process are not genuinely willing to be influenced, the process should not be started. Proceeding without that commitment does not simply waste participants’ time; it risks organisational credibility in a way that is difficult to recover, particularly with communities the organisation will need to work with again.

The Care Act statutory guidance defines co-production as people influencing not just the services they receive, but how those services are designed, commissioned, and delivered. Across these frameworks, the common thread is the same: workshops and design tools can support co-production, but they do not create it on their own.

The Test You Must Pass Before Claiming Co-production

One of the more common pitfalls in public engagement is using the language of partnership without the substance to back it up. When participants sense that their involvement has not genuinely shaped anything, it can undermine confidence in the process and make future engagement harder to sustain. A practical way to guard against this is to agree three public answers before any work begins.

First, what is still genuinely undecided and can actually be shaped by participants? The UK government’s consultation principles explicitly warn against asking questions on issues where there is already a settled view. Second, what power is being shared, expressed in decision rights rather than slogans? The Welsh social care code is unusually direct in requiring transparent arrangements that place people as equal partners in designing, operating, reviewing, and evaluating services. Third, what evidence will demonstrate that participants actually influenced outcomes, through decision logs, published rationale, and “you said, we did” reporting?

If any of these answers are vague, the process may still be worthwhile. But it should be called engagement or involvement, not co-production.

Co-production Is Not a Legal Substitute for Consultation

This distinction matters enormously for UK practitioners. Where statute requires consultation, in NHS service changes, adult social care commissioning, planning decisions, or other regulated contexts, co-production does not replace it. The UK Supreme Court’s analysis in the Moseley judgment confirmed that fairness requirements, the Gunning principles of formative-stage involvement, sufficient information, adequate time, and conscientious consideration of responses, remain a practical prescription for fairness that is hard to improve on.

Critically, the courts focus on substance rather than labels. An informal co-production stage can still be scrutinised if it functionally served as the only meaningful opportunity people had to influence a decision. The safest and most effective model is to treat co-production as an upstream design stage that generates better, more realistic options, and then use a formal consultation to test those options, meet statutory duties, and build a defensible audit trail.

Designing for Real Inclusion

Inclusion is not a by-product of good intentions. It requires budget, specific recruitment routes, accessible formats, and practical support for participants. A single open call almost always reproduces the “usual suspects” problem. Effective recruitment maps stakeholders across three layers: those most directly affected, particularly people facing inequality, those who deliver or enable services, and those who make or fund decisions. Outreach then combines targeted contact via trusted intermediaries, plain-language open applications, purposeful sampling to fill gaps, and where appropriate, random selection for time-limited panels.

Reciprocity matters too. If public bodies extract people’s time, emotional labour, and expertise while paying professionals for the same work, they embed structural inequality into the process itself. The National Institute for Health and Care Research publishes widely used benchmark payment rates (around £27.50 per hour, £82.50 for a half-day, £165 for a full day) that provide a credible basis for budgeting participant support. These figures are written for health research involvement but the financial logic transfers directly.

Governance: Shared Power With Clear Accountability

Before governance structures are even designed, there is a prior question that organisations often skip: are the people with ultimate decision-making authority genuinely prepared to be bound by what a co-production process produces? If the answer is uncertain, that needs to be resolved first. A process that launches with ambiguity at the top, and later overrides or quietly ignores participant outputs, can cause more reputational damage than not engaging at all. Communities talk to one another, and word that an organisation runs involvement processes without real intent to act on them travels quickly.

A common failure mode once that commitment is in place is to promise shared power but run everything through an internal steering group. To avoid this, the governance model must be chosen deliberately and written down before recruitment begins.

Options range from joint steering groups with shared voting rights within an agreed remit, to co-design working groups that shape options while a formal board retains statutory accountability, to participatory budgeting where communities hold genuine decision power over a bounded resource. Each model has strengths and failure modes. Joint steering groups can be undermined by invisible authority vetoes; working groups can leave participants feeling ignored if their influence is not logged and reported back; participatory budgeting can be captured by the most organised voices if the rules and outreach are weak.

Whatever model is chosen, a published influence statement, one page, plain language, explaining what participants can change, what they cannot and why, who decides and when, and how outputs feed into final decisions, is both a practical governance tool and reputational protection against challenge.

What Success Actually Looks Like

Evaluation of co-production too often stops at participant satisfaction. That is necessary but not sufficient. Meaningful evaluation tests three layers: process quality (was it fair, inclusive, and well-informed?), decision influence (what changed as a direct result?), and downstream outcomes (did implementation, uptake, equity, or costs actually improve?).

The Care Act statutory guidance includes a case study from Derby City Council where an inclusive co-production approach took longer than an internally managed process, but produced better-quality materials and transferable principles that continued to add value. The NHS statutory guidance describes a practical pattern worth copying: thematic analysis followed by further sessions to validate themes and co-write strategy language with communities, a sense-check loop that builds legitimacy into the final product.

The Bottom Line

Co-production, done properly, is not cheap, fast, or comfortable. It requires upfront investment in facilitation, participant support, documentation, and evaluation. It requires decision-makers to attend key sessions and to publish, clearly and honestly, how outputs were used and what did not change and why. What it offers in return is options that are more realistic, more equitable, and more deliverable, and decisions that are genuinely harder to challenge, because the people affected helped shape them.

The discipline that makes co-production real is clarity about decision space: who decides what, by when, and on what grounds. Without that clarity, co-production is either theatre or an informal process that triggers legal duties without meeting them. With it, it is one of the most powerful tools available to public bodies serious about working with, rather than merely for, the people they serve.

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How tCI Can Help

Advice and Guidance
A tCI faculty member will work alongside you to support the development of your decisions and engagement approach. We provide independent, constructive advice at critical stages, helping you strengthen stakeholder mapping, test communication strategies, and plan robust post-decision engagement. Our role is to act as a critical friend, offering practical recommendations grounded in consultation law and good practice that build confidence in your process.

Risk Assessment
Early identification of legal, political or reputational risks in your engagement approach. Using tCI’s five-risk methodology, we spot gaps before challenge arises, helping you strengthen stakeholder communication and demonstrate procedural fairness from the outset.

Executive Briefings
Concise updates for senior leaders on consultation law, engagement duties and post-decision risks. Helps boards and leadership teams make confident, defensible decisions when under pressure, with clear guidance on what good engagement looks like after difficult choices are made.

Whether you’re preparing for a high stakes service change or building defensible evidence for complex decisions, we can help.

Contact tCI: hello@consultationinstitute.org