When is personalisation considered a form of co-production? The case of personal budgets reform in English social care

Personalisation of social care in England involves the active participation of users in shaping how care is being delivered to them. Since its inception in the mid-2000s, the concept has also diffused across different fields of social care. Despite its growing ubiquity, personalisation is not well defined, and what, if any, links to personal budgets are still being debated. Parallel to the emergence of personalisation, there is also a growing interest in considering the co-production of certain types of public services – social and health care being prime examples – between citizen users and the state. Like personalisation, there is no consensus on what co-production is, even if there are many different examples and definitions. The aims of this chapter are to analyse the trends in personalization in England and to debate the extent to which personalisation and co-production are related and/or overlap. These questions are considered within the context of a case study on the use of personal budgets in an English local authority.