Horizon Europe: Growing concern over delay to formalising UK membership

Horizon Europe is Europe’s flagship R&D funding programme and, with a budget of EUR 95-billion, is the largest transnational research programme in the world.

As we have reported previously, the UK’s continued membership of the Horizon programme was agreed in December 2020 under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), which set out the terms of the post-Brexit relationship between the UK and the EU.

However, 10 months on and the UK’s membership has still not been formalised. As reported by Science Business, this is leading to growing concern and speculation that delays are linked to tensions between the British government and the EU over Northern Ireland.

Europe’s previous funding programmes have historically been a significant and important source of funding for the UK research community, which secured EUR 7 billion under Horizon 2020.

The growing uncertainty caused by the delays to formalising the UK’s memberships means that any sense of relief felt by the research community on agreement of the TCA last year is evaporating. Given the fundamental importance of enabling scientific research and the benefits of cross border collaboration, it would be disappointing to see this issue become politicised.