Dr Simon Duffy

Dr Simon Duffy is Director of Citizen Network and he has worked to advance social justice for over three decades. His work has been both practical and theoretical. He has created several social innovations and organisations and also developed a number of ideas and theories, particularly centred on the ideal of citizenship.

Simon’s family is Manchester Irish and he grew in Bury, Bolton and Durham. He studied Philosophy and Politics at Edinburgh University. In 1988 Simon trained as an NHS Management Trainee, based at the King’s Fund and gained a Diploma in Management Studies from Thames Polytechnic. After visiting an institution for people with learning disabilities Simon focused his work on deinstitutionalisation.

From 1990 to 1994 led innovation and development for Southwark Consortium, one of the organisations that had pioneered community care in the 1980s. He did pioneering work on individual funding, supported living, person-centred planning and organisational development and was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1994. Based at the JFK Centre for Development Disabilities at the University of Colorado he researched inclusive education, the design of the welfare state and the history of the Holocaust for people with disabilities. This led to the publication of The Unmaking of Man which explores the factors that create stigma and moral breakdown.

In 1996 Simon published Unlocking the Imagination which described a new paradigm for organising support for social services. He also founded and led Inclusion Glasgow to support people with learning disabilities to move from the long-stay hospital Lennox Castle Hospital. This work done with a ground-breaking model of personalised support. It was first time that deinstitutionalisation gave every individual their own plan, budget, support team and home of their own. This work has been influential globally and led to the publication of the Keys to Citizenship in 2003 that has been adopted by many activists, researchers and service providers. In 2024 a new easy Read version of the model was published, Everyday Citizenship, co-authored with Wendy Perez, a woman with learning disabilities.

In 2002 Simon and his family moved back home to the North of England and he has lived and worked in Sheffield ever since. In 2003 he co-founded in Control, a movement to transform the organisation of social care in England. He was CEO of in Control from 2003-2009 and during that time developed and tested the concepts of individual and personal budgets, resource allocation systems and self-directed support. Over 100 English local authorities joined the programme and in 2008 central government supported this work with the publication of Putting People First. Duffy was awarded the Prince Albert Medal from the RSA in 2008 and an award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Policy by the Social Policy Association in 2011. Simon also pioneered the use of personal budgets in education and health and a model of personalised transition for young people with complex needs.

In 2009 Simon, along with his wife Nicola, founded the Centre for Welfare Reform as a Northern think-tank with the goal of developing genuinely progressive and egalitarian social policies for the whole welfare state. However after 2010 the primary focus of the Centre’s work became defending people, especially disabled people, from the severe harms caused by Austerity and Welfare Reform. His research on the cumulative impact of the cuts was cited in Parliament and the Centre supported many campaigns led by disabled people. The Centre has played an important role in drawing particular attention to the needs of people with energy impairments and it hosted the Chronic Illness Inclusion Project. The Centre also established the Learning Disability Alliance ahead of the 2015 General Election and then help found Learning Disability England, the primary umbrella body for people with learning disabilities.

Increasingly his work began to focus on the value of cooperative action, peer support and action at a neighbourhood level. In 2011 he co-authored Women at the Centre with Clare Hyde, which focused on the pioneering work of WomenCentre, based in Halifax and Kirklees. This demonstrated the inadequacy of the current system and the benefits of a gender-based system of peer support. Sion has also been a close collaborator with People Focused Group Doncaster, a peer support group of over 3,000 people with mental health and other needs which is transforming local communities and services. He has published several reports about their work and developed new approaches for measuring social value.

In 2020 Simon co-founded the Neighbourhood Democracy Movement with Angela Fell, which connects groups wanting to see a radical shift of democratic power to local communities and the establishment of real participative democracy. He has also served on the Steering Group of the Democracy Network and has been very active in the movement for Yorkshire Devolution. 

Simon has also been a long-term advocate of basic income. He advocated basic income in his writing as a Harkness Fellow and at the Centre for Welfare Reform. In 2016 he co-founded UBI Lab Sheffield and the UBI Lab Network which has been the most successful campaigning group in the UK on basic income. He was a transitional Chair of Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, the oldest group advocating for basic income, and he successfully established a new and more sustainable future for the group which has now returned to its older name, the Basic Income Research Group. Simon, working with several disabled researchers, created the concept of Basic Income Plus in order to make the idea of basic income more inclusive and practical as a social policy. He has spoken widely on this topic, including on TV and radio.

A current priority in his work is to develop a model of Neighbourhood Care, weaving together many of the progressive innovations that have emerged over the past decades into a community-based approach to care that better respects the rights of women and disabled people. Currently he is working closely with the South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority, the NHS and the four cities of South Yorkshire to create a strategy for Neighbourhood Care. He is also developing models of digital mapping to identify neighbourhoods and help local citizens to gather information for social action.

Much of Simon’s work is international. He has advised governments in New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Spain, Latvia and Finland. He was successful in persuading Finland to adopt a policy of personal budgets and he has led work to critique the Australia’s National Disability Insurance System (NDIS). Duffy also wrote the EU Roadmap for User-Centred Funding for Long-Term Care and Support. He founded the Self-Directed Support Network to connect experts and activists globally in defining best practice in self-direction and individualised funding.

In 2016 Simon co-founded Citizen Network to advance inclusion for all and the Centre for Welfare Reform was eventually integrated into Citizen Network. It has over 5,000 individual members and 300 group members in over 50 countries. Citizen Network exists to connect individuals and groups around a vision of a world where everyone matters and seeks to encourage shared learning, action and creativity.

Simon has also done a range of different academic work. He has an MA Politics and Philosophy and a doctorate in meta-ethics, making the case for the objectivity of morality, both from Edinburgh University. He has written over 500 articles, papers or books. His work includes numerous journal articles on social service reform, basic income and issues of ethics and justice. Simon also writes on wider issues of politics, philosophy and justice.