Much has been made of the advantages of active support and person-centred planning, both of which have gradually been evolving and changing over the last 25-30 years. The latter is now mandated in the UK as part of the "Valuing People" strategy on disability (Department of Health UK, 2001), and is also central to the follow-up policy document, "Valuing People Now" (Department of Health UK, 2007). In this article, the authors address the important question of how person-centred active support is. They highlight the important contribution of active support (AS) in challenging disability services to achieve a person-centred approach. They argue that AS cannot be considered to be fully person-centred unless it is explicitly based on a person-centred plan, and the focus is implementing that plan. The explicit combination of these two approaches offers a means of ensuring that AS focuses on what matters to the person, and AS offers a way to ensure that person-centred plans can be successfully implemented.