Britain warns the clock is ticking over its participation in Horizon Europe and other EU research programs.
The British government’s decision to trigger formal dispute talks over Brussels’ refusal to sign off on its participation in EU science schemes, including the €95.5-billion Horizon Europe, has deepened concerns among researchers and universities that the U.K. is poised to pull out altogether.
The European Commission has chosen to link Britain’s previously-agreed involvement in Horizon Europe projects with the ongoing row over post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland. In an increasingly bitter tit-for-tat dispute, neither side looks likely to back down.
The two sides will hold crisis talks in Brussels within the next 30 days, but the prospect of a quick resolution is slim. The next stage of arbitration would require the appointment of an independent panel, which would then be given more than three months to reach a decision.
The U.K. government says researchers and businesses urgently need certainty over their funding and is signaling it could officially abandon Horizon Europe as early as next month, setting up a home-grown alternative without bothering to go to arbitration.
A U.K.-based scheme would be unlikely to replicate the sheer breadth of Horizon Europe, however, which funds projects spanning different research centers across multiple member countries. And the U.K would be unlikely to rejoin Brussels’ programs until at least the setting of the next EU budget in 2028, if not beyond.
Political leverage
Frustrated with the state of play, some researchers have started packing their bags.
Moritz Treeck, a malaria researcher at the Francis Crick Institute in London, is one of many world-leading scientists based in Britain who were awarded a Horizon Europe grant after Brexit, only to be later notified by the Commission that he must either emigrate to another country with full or associated EU status, or give up on the cash altogether — along with the cherished opportunity to lead the project he designed.
Treeck said he has now found a research institution in another participating country to host his groundbreaking research into how the malaria parasite modulates its ability to cause disease in humans — which was awarded a €2 million grant by the European Research Council (ERC), the most prestigious pillar of Horizon Europe — and is preparing to leave the U.K. for good.
“We became part of political leverage around the Northern Ireland protocol, but nobody benefits from it. It’s purely stupid,” Treeck said. “But I don’t think the U.K. government will change its mind over the protocol just because of a few ERC awardees. We are small fish in the big game.”
Indeed, the indefinite delay to Britain’s involvement has now kicked off an academic version of the football transfer window, with universities all over Europe pouring over the lists of grantees published by the Commission and making offers to those based in the U.K. Treeck said he was approached by several institutions inside the EU eager to attract new talent.
Hendrik Ulbricht, a quantum physicist at the University of Southampton, has also received multiple offers from abroad. At the time of the interview, he was boarding a flight to Germany, his home country, to discuss an opportunity to relocate his research into the use of levitated particles to create hyper-sensitive gravity sensors, which could one day be used to detect large masses underground such as oil deposits.
