In the 21st century, consultants are an increasingly prominent ingredient in public services. Sometimes they attract critical comment, as though they are merely parasites, exploiting rather than contributing to these services. Yet consultants are often sought by the agencies providing services. People who work in public services are likely to encounter consultants occupying roles formerly carried out by full-time employees of central or local government. We arrived at one local authority to find that the position of director of children's services was occupied, temporarily, by a full-time consultant, recruited on a medium term contract and paid for by the local authority. Consultants, therefore, have become integral to the workforce of public services. Yet there is a need to understand better what the nature of consultancy is and, from the viewpoint of consultants, how it is carried out. Also, there is increasingly in the 21st century a need to understand how consultancy can be directed towards meeting the needs, and satisfying the wishes and demands, of citizens. The rhetoric of government policy, after all, is that public services should be person-centred, and, in many senses, person-led, patient-led, user-led, carer-led, or as we would call it in this book spanning public services as a whole, citizen-led.

As we reflected on more than 25 years’ work, much of it together, as consultants across many areas of public services – from the criminal justice system to health and social services, in different sectors of education and training, from colleges to universities including The Open University, and in government agencies – we discovered a major gap in the literature on consultancy, which seems on the whole to be geared towards the requirements of private industry and commerce rather than towards public services. Perhaps more significant, we became increasingly aware that the way we work – ‘with’ citizens rather than ‘on’ them or ‘on their behalf’ – goes against the grain of much of the literature on consultancy that assumes that by virtue of employing consultants agencies, organisations and groups acknowledge that in their field the consultants know best, and that it is not for service users, carers, patients, consumers of public services or indeed any other members of the public to challenge them.