Listening to and respecting service users’ voices and perspectives is increasingly known to be an essential part of developing quality health and social care services.

In this user-led report, Shaping Our Lives aims to add new dimensions to this understanding by looking carefully at the impact on service users of becoming service user representatives. Drawing on the experiences of Disabled people who been called upon as ‘service user experts’ to share their views and take part in consultation exercises, this report probes a national paradox where service users are valued and taken seriously in the consultation context but are still subject to less respectful power relations in their day-to-day experiences as service users.