Co-production or Consultation? Why the Difference Matters

Many organisations now describe service user involvement as co-production, even when the activity is closer to consultation. The distinction is not semantic. It determines who holds power, what resourcing is required, and what happens when expectations are not met.

What is the difference between consultation and co-production?

Consultation is a process in which an organisation asks people for their views on a proposal it has already shaped, and keeps the decision afterwards. Co-production, a way of working in which people who use services, carers and communities act as equal partners from the earliest stages of design through to evaluation, shares responsibility for shaping that proposal from the outset.

The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) puts the distinction plainly: involvement means being consulted, while co-production means being equal partners and co-creators in the work itself. SCIE’s review of the evidence goes further, stating that consultation on its own does not amount to co-production, however well it is run.

This matters because both terms describe legitimate, valuable activity. The problem arises when an organisation runs one and calls it the other.

Why does the power question matter more than the label?

The clearest way to test whether an activity is consultation or co-production is to ask who holds the power to decide. Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 “Ladder of Citizen Participation,” a framework that ranks forms of public participation by how much real influence citizens are given, remains the most influential answer to that question.

Arnstein placed informing, consultation and placation in the category of tokenism, activity that gives the appearance of influence without transferring any of it. Partnership, delegated power and citizen control sit higher on the ladder, representing genuine shifts in decision-making authority.

Consultation can take place without any redistribution of power. The organisation defines the issue, sets the questions, gathers responses and decides what happens next. Co-production cannot work this way. By definition, it requires a transfer of power and resources, and a recognition that lived experience, the first-hand knowledge of people who use a service, carries the same weight as professional or technical expertise.

An organisation can run an excellent consultation without sharing decision-making power at all. What it cannot do is call that same exercise co-production and expect participants, or regulators, to accept the label at face value.

What does genuine co-production actually require?

SCIE identifies four core principles: equality, diversity, accessibility and reciprocity, meaning that participants get something back for what they put in. Guidance derived from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), summarised by the University of Edinburgh, adds sharing power, including all relevant perspectives and skills, and building and maintaining relationships over time.

Taken together, these frameworks point to five practical requirements. People are involved before solutions are developed, not after. Participation continues through co-design, co-decision-making, co-delivery and co-evaluation, not as a single event. Lived experience is treated as expertise on equal footing with professional knowledge. Participation is resourced properly, with payment, training, accessibility support and time built in. And the organisation genuinely shares decision-making authority, not just the appearance of it.

None of this is impossible. But it is a different undertaking from running a consultation exercise, however well designed.

What does it cost an organisation to confuse the two?

The first cost is trust. If people are invited into something described as co-production but discover they were only being consulted, the gap between what was promised and what was delivered becomes the story, regardless of how good the underlying decision turns out to be.

The second cost is under-resourcing. Co-production without payment, training, accessibility support or time for relationship building is not co-production with the difficult parts removed. It is consultation wearing a different name, and participants tend to notice.

The third cost is accountability confusion. Consultation allows an organisation to retain ownership of the decision while demonstrating that it met the Gunning principles, the established legal test for fair public consultation in the UK, derived from R v London Borough of Brent ex parte Gunning (1985) and confirmed in R (Moseley) v London Borough of Haringey [2014] UKSC 56.

Co-production requires shared ownership. An organisation that claims the language of co-production while retaining sole decision-making authority creates a governance arrangement that satisfies neither standard cleanly, and that ambiguity is exactly what a challenge will target.

The fourth cost is evidential. SCIE warns that if every activity involving service user input is labelled co-production, the term loses its meaning, and evaluation and accountability suffer because fundamentally different activities get grouped together under one heading.

For a practitioner, this is the cost that surfaces last but lingers longest. If your own evaluation reports, board papers and decision records use co-production loosely, that gap between what was promised and what was delivered becomes part of your organisation’s evidence base, available to anyone reviewing the decision afterwards.

The choice between consultation and co-production is not a test of which one is better. Each is the right tool for different circumstances, carrying different legal duties, resourcing needs and degrees of shared power. The only real failure is choosing one, naming it the other, and finding out the difference only when someone else points it out.

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