Horizon Europe agreement offers strong future for research

In a statement agreed today (12 April 2019), UUK’s board is urging government to act now to confirm the UK’s association to Horizon Europe, whether we leave the EU or not.

Statement from the UUK Board:

The UUK Board welcomes the agreement reached between the EU institutions on 20 March on the main features of the Horizon Europe programme, which will succeed the Horizon 2020 programme and is due to run between 2021-27.

The EU Framework Programmes have proven very effective at facilitating and stimulating high quality pan-European research and innovation collaboration. Thanks to this agreement, we are confident that Horizon Europe will continue to foster productive collaborations by identifying excellent research ideas through a combination of mission-driven calls and researcher-led ‘blue sky’ competitions.

Subject to future agreement on the provisions for third country participation and the budget, this text preserves the key principles for the next Framework Programme championed by UUK. Most importantly, we are pleased to see that Horizon Europe will remain steadfastly committed to funding excellence wherever it is found, and that it aims to be even more open to the world, including by continuing to draw on non-EU expertise in evaluation and permitting the exploitation of results across the world.

We now call on the UK government to work with the European Commission to ensure that UK association to this programme is agreed at the earliest possible date, irrespective of the final outcome of Brexit. This is not only in the interest of UK universities and our European partners, but also of all European citizens who benefit from the fruits of these collaborations.