ABSTRACT
Peter Beresford (academic and mental health activist) and Suzy Croft (senior practitioner and activist) have written widely on public, patient and service user participation in social service policy and practice. In this article, they return to themes introduced in their first publication in 1980, which might be read as a manifesto for community control of social services. What is striking about both pieces is how resonant their argument remains today. The full article charts the factors associated with both regulatory and liberatory forms of social work and we encourage readers to read it in full. However, building on the two previous chapters, our focus here is on practitioners and service users ‘re-uniting’ as a key mechanism for liberatory social work reform. This seems an apt, if challenging, note on which to conclude this first section.
