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Civic and Public Engagement

Payment Guidance

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Payment Guidance on Patient and Public Involvement Reimbursement formats.

Paying participants

Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) contributors are members of the public who are invited to provide input into how research is conducted, from the perspective of their lived experience. 

PPI contributors are a valuable part of the research process whose time, effort and experience should be fairly compensated or rewarded, and doing so is an integral part of conducting research.

If you are a researcher or academic you should liaise with your School Operations team or relevant administrator about paying public participants or contributors, as you will need access to Agresso to do so.

A record of all amounts paid to participants must be maintained by PIs and kept in a department central location. This must be kept for 6 years and available on demand for inspection by HMRC if requested.

The CPE recommend using the NIHR guidance on payment rates to calculate your rate of payment for a public participant or contributor.

You can either pay public/patient participants via BACS payment or voucher. All payment methods will take minimum 4 weeks for payment to be made.

Both vouchers and BACS payments are taxable and can impact on welfare benefits.

Tax and benefits

You should ensure that your activity is considered a PPI activity (an ad-hoc contribution to a research project), rather than administrative or professional work.

If you are claiming benefits and are receiving over £184.30 total in any given week for PPI work this will affect the ability to claim benefits.

If you are being paid over £1,000.00 per year for taking part in PPI activities, you must declare these earnings to HMRC.

Please contact the finance-tax-manager@qmul.ac.uk with any questions about tax status.

BACS payments

In addition to payment for involvement or participation in research, the payment process can also be used to reimburse reasonable expenses in line with the Queen Mary Expenses Policy. Expenses may include travel, subsistence or childcare, depending on individual circumstances and by prior arrangement. Reimbursement will be made only after receipts have been produced.

To make a BACS payment, your options are as follows:

  1. Visitor Expense Portal (This portal is digital and will require participants to have computer and internet access)
  2. Complete the Queen Mary research volunteer compensation form [DOC 49KB] - If paying a participant for the first time complete all of the form. For each subsequent session, payees will only need to complete the Payment Request Form (page 3). The form needs to be signed by the relevant manager and then emailed to expenses@qmul.ac.ukwith the words 'PPIE Claim' in the email's subject line.
  3. Complete the Expense-Claim-Form-updated-May-2017.xlsx [XLS 167KB] and send to expenses@qmul.ac.uk

Please contact expenses@qmul.ac.uk with any questions about any of the above.

Vouchers

There are two voucher suppliers set up on Agresso – VEX (Trading name Hemingways Ltd) and Pluxee. The CPE suggest using VEX to purchase vouchers for participants.

Please note, vouchers will only be dispatched once Queen Mary has made payment, so it can take minimum of 4 weeks to receive vouchers to distribute to participants.

You can find guidelines for ordering vouchers as follows:

VEX

Pluxee

Barts Health

If your project is based at Barts Health, you can find more information about reimbursing expenses and payments for involvement and participation in research on the JRMO webpages and you can contact the Research Engagement team at patientsinresearch.bartshealth@nhs.net.

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