In these hope-sapping days of austerity in social care and health there are some who say that the system is starved of money and just needs some more to be ok, lots more, and that the system contains the ‘experts’ who are needed to use a variety of assessment and expert led techniques to decide who gets what from the dwindling pots of health and social care resources and services. What I am interested in is whether we can live up to a much more optimistic viewpoint and prove that if we engage people much more fully in their own…