Horizon Europe: what is the "right deal" for the UK?

For scientists and researchers across the UK, the latest confirmation that the UK’s association with Horizon Europe has once again been delayed will come as no surprise. And yet most will be deeply frustrated and concerned that vital research collaborations with European partners are once again put into the “deep freeze”.

I was talking to a very senior UK research leader last week who told me they had recently spent months working on a research partnership with an EU institution. They had been assured by their organisation’s funding administrators that the research would be eligible for either Horizon funding, or for the UK Government’s Horizon guarantee – only for this to turn out not to be the case. The uncertainty and relative complexity around the funding arrangements mean that those responsible for administering these systems are making mistakes, leading to wasted time, effort and further damaging the relationships which should be delivering world-class collaborative research.

Government sources have once again stated that their aim is to get “the right deal for the UK and the UK taxpayer… I think people would rather we took time to get things right. We are not going to agree with something unless we are 100 per cent happy.” These are laudable aims, right? No one would disagree with this, right?

Well, nearly.

Clearly, getting a deal at the right price is important. The way Horizon Europe works (like most EU funding programmes) is that the Member States, plus others invited to join, pool their financial resources for a fixed number of years. They work together to agree the priorities for the spending, and then the European Commission are given responsibility for administrating the programme. It wouldn’t make sense for one country to pay significantly more than others if it didn’t feel that it got equivalent value – either through growth or other economic benefits as a result of the programme, or (particularly the case for Member States) it was part of a wider “package” of investment where putting money into something you were less interested in meant you had bargaining leverage on something you did care more about. The last of these does not really apply for the UK, since our interactions with the EU are now far more transactional as we are not a Member State.

But does waiting until “we are 100 per cent happy” result in the best deal for the UK? What about the cost of the nearly four years of uncertainty that has swirled around the UK’s participation in Horizon Europe?

Currently, that lack of a deal is having real, practical impacts. There are other examples like the one I mention above of researchers losing out on funding because of the ongoing uncertainty. The other big impact has been in the perception of the UK as a safe, sustainable place to do research and build a research career.

If you speak to researchers – something I do get the chance to do through CRUK’s network of funded centres and researchers across the whole of the UK – you will hear many stories of students, postdocs and potential PIs being put off coming to live and work in the UK. This is partly about the practicalities – now the UK is no longer a Member State, EU researchers have a far higher burden of visas and entry requirements than previously. Some UK institutions now have to employ staff to assist with visa applications, adding to research cost overheads.

An Institute Director has told me that it now costs as much for a UK institution to host a postgraduate student from an EU country as a postdoc. If this means fewer postgraduates coming to study at UK institutions, this leads to fewer postgrads staying on to become postdocs, fewer postdocs becoming Principal Investigators. We are narrowing the pyramid of researchers in the UK.

Finally, the lack of a deal adds to the sense of EU students and researchers feeling “unwelcome” in the UK. This is something the research community can and needs to do more to address – but cannot do alone. There are consequences of public policy choices which cannot be addressed solely by the affected sector.

Many in UK research fear that – for the foreseeable future – UK receipts would be significantly lower than the expected level of UK financial contribution. Institutions and researchers in the UK and across the EU have built up relationships over the four decades that Horizon and its predecessors have been running. The three-and-a-half years since the UK left the EU have seen those relationships fraying, as there is no longer the confidence that the funding will be there to fund research partnerships.

The costs of delaying a decision to associate with the Horizon Europe programme are mounting up for UK researchers. Just because these impacts are hard to measure, distributed across a large number of organisations and often part of a broader set of frictional costs, does not mean they don’t exist. It is essential that negotiators on both sides recognise this and do not let the perception of an “ideal agreement” prevent a workable agreement being reached.