BASW General Election Blog: Payment in co-production
Payment in co-production: recognising the value of lived experience
It is clearly good news that co-production and lived experience involvement are gaining traction across health and social care.
But increased involvement also requires infrastructure to ensure that people are being involved in a safe, just, and democratic way - and a cornerstone of this infrastructure is payment. Involvement payments are paid to Experts by Experience who undertake co-production work in their own time.
Too often, people with lived experience are asked to contribute to projects without proper recompense, or offered payment that does not adequately reflect their knowledge or expertise. Many organisations have an understanding of why involving people with lived experience is so important, and the willingness to make it happen. But too often, payment is an afterthought, and budgets are not designed from the beginning to incorporate meaningful involvement. Lived experience budgets are often standalone, and not included in general project or campaign budget lines. This can minimise the impact Experts by Experience have.
This is improving in health and social care settings, and many organisations now follow NIHR’s guidance on payment or have their own payment policies. This is good news. Yet even where organisations have good policies, there are often complications when it comes to paying people who receive benefits.
There are huge restrictions on how much money benefits claimants can earn before being sanctioned – those on ESA can earn less than £167 per week, for example, and Universal Credit claimants have a work allowance of £379 per month. This is the case even if people are paid through vouchers or some other equivalent payment.
Organisations themselves have a responsibility to support benefits claimants with any payments they receive, and many have relationships with independent advisors who can help people navigate what is already a very stressful, sometimes triggering, system. This is vital to ensure that everyone can be involved and paid fairly for their labour.
However, changes in DWP policy would be more significant, reviewing how involvement payments are seen in order to encourage people to engage in lived experience work. This would ensure that people are able to use their deep expertise to improve health and social care services without anxiety or fear of sanction, making the field more fair and more open for everyone.
BASW is therefore calling on the next UK Government to carry out a review of how involvement payments are treated by the DWP, with a view to making it a fairer and simpler system.
