Manchester is embedding paid community researchers into local government to ensure that residents—not just officials—shape the policies that affect their health and well-being. This matters because Manchester, despite its economic growth, faces stark health inequalities that worsened during the pandemic. Traditional top-down policymaking often misses what communities actually need. The project builds on the city’s “Making Manchester Fairer” action plan, which targets poverty and health disparities across eight priority themes, but lacks a systematic way to feed resident insights into decision-making. If successful, the project will create a permanent, city-wide system where community-generated evidence is routinely used by the council, housing providers, and health services. This could shift how public money is spent and how services are designed—not just in Manchester, but as a model for other cities. The research is applied and participatory: it aims to change how policy is made, not to generate new scientific knowledge. The outcome would be a more responsive, equitable system for tackling the root causes of poor health.
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The Manchester HDRC places communities at the heart of policy by creating a city-wide co-produced research system, cementing existing collaborations and partnerships by linking the City Council (MCC), the University of Manchester (UoM) and other Higher Education Institutions, community groups, housing providers, voluntary, community, social enterprise and faith sector partners to identify and undertake shared research priorities on the wider determinants of health. Manchester is known for its diversity and strong economic growth over the last two decades. However, it faces challenges in improving health outcomes, promoting inclusion, and addressing inequalities, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The "Making Manchester Fairer" (MMF) Action Plan focuses on 8 priority themes to combat poverty and health disparities, establishing multi-agency teams in various neighbourhoods. But there is a need to enhance support for residents and better understand their health and well-being concerns. We will accelerate research, incorporate community insights, aiming to mainstream evidence-based decision-making across the city to address health inequalities effectively. Aims: Engaging & Empowering Communities: to ensure that residents in geographical and shared interest communities have opportunities to influences policy and services. Embedded Community Researchers will empower local communities and residents to participate in research & use evidence to influence decision making. User-friendly systems will disseminate findings among communities to ensure involvement in findings implementation and measuring impact. Building networks & skills: to embed the findings of bottom-up research into practice by disrupting existing hierarchical structures and creating equitable new systems across organisations and departments. Sustainable training, mentorship, partnerships, and support, co-produced by residents will address Community Insight Representatives identified research priorities and skills gaps. Mainstreaming community-based research and evidence-based policy: to develop a culture where multi-agency and community-led research is mainstreamed across MCC. Community generated insights and findings integrated into wider MCC structures and departments to ensure demonstrable longevity and sustainability of our work. Milestones: Understand, create, and collaborate (Year 1) - creating the HDRC, co-produced with partners, residents, and communities, understanding the research picture across Manchester and identifying and prioritising needs. Pilot, demonstrate and disseminate (Years 2-4) - implementation, focussed on testing, learning, and refining, developing an agile and responsive model, and mainstreaming an ‘evidence to action’ culture. Transition, evaluate and maintain (Year 5) - transition, ensuring sustainability of the most successful elements of the HDRC to embed culture change and build research skills and capacity into local, regional, and national policy. Our collaborative research system will build capacity ensuring knowledge transfer and exchange, engaging various levels of stakeholders from commissioning teams to policymakers. It will involve multiple beneficiaries, including individuals, communities, organizations, and the academic community, aiming for maximum impact within complex systems. It fosters appropriate findings development, targeting system-wide cultural change to reduce health inequalities and improve well-being and life chances.
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