Sophie Cloutterbuck, LPIP Hub Place Fellow, City-REDI, University of Birmingham, blogs on the boundary-spanners keeping London’s health research honest and what happens when councils try to pay residents fairly for their expertise. This post draws on a wider study of London boroughs’ Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs) public and partner engagement — read the full report for the complete findings and recommendations.
London’s four Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs) in Islington, Tower Hamlets, Ealing and Lambeth each receive £5 million over five years from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to build local research capacity around the wider determinants of health: housing, employment, environment, the conditions people actually live in. That funding buys strategy documents, governance boards and data platforms. What it can’t buy directly is trust. And trust, it turns out, is mostly built by specific people doing a specific, exhausting job: sitting in the gap between a council’s timelines, a university’s ethics processes, and a community’s lived reality, and making sure none of the three crushes the other two.
The Boundary-Spanners Keeping Engagement Honest
It was to describe this exact boundary-spanning work that an interesting term came out from one of the participants in the interviews within the wider study of London boroughs’ Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs) public and partner engagement: “ferryman.” It is a great descriptor for a function that every single borough described: people sitting at the join, spanning boundaries, and translating constantly between local councils, residents, VCF organisations, and HEIs to carry something fragile across gaps that would otherwise swallow it whole.
In London’s funded HDRCs, this boundary-spanning function is gradually being recognised and embedded through formal, paid roles. In comparator boroughs working without that dedicated funding, like Southwark and Havering, the exact same function still takes place, often through committed staff stepping beyond their core job descriptions and relying on individual relationships that can be vulnerable when key staff move on.
What ferrymen actually do
What these boundary spanners, whether university- or council-based, actually do is build and maintain relationships and manage institutional pace to keep engagement on track, collaborative and impactful for everyone. One university partner in Tower Hamlets described their role plainly:
“To facilitate researchers from our universities, to be the ferryman almost, taking them from our universities into the HDRC, and back and forth.”
That back-and-forth is actual daily labour, explaining to a council officer why a community group needs six more weeks, to a professor why a resident’s story is valid data, or to a resident why council repairs take time.
Often, keeping engagement genuine means deliberately slowing things down. As an HEI partner in Ealing put it:
“We’ve been slowing them down when they’ve wanted to rush in… we want the community researchers to establish the focus for their action research group before they come to you and open up.”
Without someone protecting that slower, human rhythm, engagement becomes extractive almost by accident. And where this boundary-spanning infrastructure is missing, an honest fear takes over, as one Havering interviewee reflected:
“There is a fear that if we engage too well and listen too much, we’ll uncover a mountain of need that we simply don’t have the budget to fix.”
That quote is worth sitting with. It’s not cynicism about community engagement; it’s an honest description of what happens when the will to listen exists, but the boundary-spanning infrastructure to act on what you hear does not. Boroughs without funded ferryman roles aren’t failing to care; they’re running the function on goodwill, which is a much more fragile fuel.
The £20 Voucher Problem
Across all six boroughs, there is complete agreement that uncompensated public engagement simply reproduces inequality, leaving participation to those who can afford to volunteer. As one Lambeth team member noted:
“You can’t ask for trust and then offer a £10 voucher for three hours of emotional labour. Paying the Living Wage… is the first brick in our relational wall.”
Why payment isn’t optional
The case for paying residents is, on its face, simple. As one local authority officer put it bluntly:
“Without fair remuneration, engagement simply reproduces inequality. It becomes the domain of those who can afford to volunteer.”
Several boroughs have acted on this: Lambeth’s Community Research Ambassadors are paid the London Living Wage, while Ealing pays 23 community researchers professional day rates, treating them as core research staff rather than compensated volunteers.
Then it collides with council finance
This is where good intentions run into ordinary bureaucratic machinery. Councils and HEIs are built to pay large contractors through vendor-setup processes that take weeks, not to issue a resident £20 for two hours at a workshop. What should be a same-day thank-you becomes a months-long administrative ordeal.
One VCF partner in Southwark summed up the absurdity:
“We talk about high-level strategy, but if we can’t pay a resident for their time without them going through a six-week vendor setup, the strategy fails at the first hurdle.”
In another borough, a reward policy meant to fix this sat stuck for two years because NIHR guidance on payment rates updated faster than local policy could align with it.
The part that’s easy to miss
Underneath the admin lies an inclusion paradox: once a resident becomes a paid community researcher, neighbours may start seeing them as an extension of the council, eroding the very authenticity that made their voice valuable. Relying on the same comfortable cohort also risks narrowing the voices being heard.
Furthermore, for residents on Universal Credit or means-tested benefits, council stipends carry a genuine risk of triggering reductions in essential state support. Paying people isn’t a transactional line item; it is a complex design problem that requires fixing the underlying financial plumbing.
What good practice looks like in practice
Good practice means budgeting for boundary-spanners as core infrastructure, the human link whose explicit job is to translate culture, mediate expectations, and manage institutional pace. It demands replacing six-week setup processes with agile micro-payment mechanisms, navigating benefit risks carefully, and ensuring fair payment is seen as one part of an ongoing relationship rather than a fee that discharges an institution’s obligation to listen.
The practical conclusion is straightforward: boundary-spanning and fair payment mechanisms must both be budgeted for and designed as core infrastructure, just as intentionally as a data platform or governance board. Treating fair remuneration as a fundamental design problem, rather than an administrative afterthought, is essential to making community partnership real. Funders and universities must also look at their own side of the bridge; fast-tracking ethics reviews for community-led research and aligning payment guidance would remove huge administrative delays. In the words of one participant of the study, London’s HDRCs are still in a “storming and forming” phase, but the ferrymen, alongside properly supported payment structures, are the reason it’s working as well as it currently is.
Floating the ideas nationally
As we bring these findings to teams, researchers, and council members from across the country around the national HDRC conference on September 10th, I hope to see those same nods of recognition in the room. While local details vary, these structural tensions around engagement, boundary-spanning, and fair remuneration are felt everywhere—and testing these lessons nationally is the next step.
Look out for our upcoming podcast episode featuring HDRC members from across the UK, where we’ll be discussing their direct thoughts on these findings, sharing behind-the-scenes reflections, and exploring where place-based research and community engagement go from here.
This blog was written by Sophie Cloutterbuck, Director of London Engagement and the London Met Lab at London Metropolitan University.
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Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.