Processing Horizon Europe grants is taking 23 days longer than Horizon 2020

Horizon Europe is in its third year, and nearing the halfway point, analysis of how the programme is progressing is beginning to roll in.

One report released last week, while containing some good news, makes disappointing reading for scientists hoping that the €94 billion funding programme would be less bureaucratic and swifter than its predecessor.

An assessment of clusters 1-3, covering grant calls in health, culture, creativity, inclusive society, and civil security for society, plus some of the programme’s partnerships, found that attempts to simplify the programme have not yet had much of an impact.

“While the majority of respondents (81.0%) find the application costs proportionate, simplification efforts introduced in Horizon Europe had a limited impact in reducing the application burden for applicants,” found the report, written by a team of consultancies and academics for the European Commission.

Applicants “express no noteworthy distinction” between the burden of Horizon Europe compared to Horizon 2020, the predecessor programme.

What’s more, it’s taking longer for the Commission to process Horizon Europe grants than was the case in Horizon 2020.

For the whole framework programme, it is now taking an average of 273 days between when calls close and grants are signed. That’s 23 days longer than for the equivalent period in Horizon 2020.

“The administrative data show that the timeliness of project selection and implementation processes have lagged behind Horizon 2020’s performance in the benchmark year,” the report says.

Nearly six in ten grants are not being processed within a target time of eight months. “Horizon Europe has met the targets for a lower share of grants,” compared to Horizon 2020.

The latest report only covers the first two years of Horizon Europe, stressed Rūta Dėlkutė-Morgan, a research manager at PPMI, the consultancy that led the study. Processing times should have improved since. “When we compared it to the trend in Horizon 2020, it was similar. The first couple of years were slower and then it picked up,” she said.

More requirements

The Commission expanded some measures in Horizon Europe to cut down on paperwork, such as lump sum funding, which means academics don’t need to report actual costs, instead receiving a single pot of money calculated in advance. This experiment has “generally been positively received”, the report found, but it is too early to say if it is really having an impact.

But other new requirements have been added in, and this may have slowed down applications, the report says.

For example, universities and research institutions applying for money must now have gender equality plans. This requires “additional steps to ensure clarity and consensus among participants, adding to the workload of the executive agency, which translates to longer procedures,” the report found.

Horizon Europe’s grant agreement preparation is “more complex and time-consuming”, the report points out, referring to the Commission’s own assessment from 2022.

The programme’s delayed start, and the “residual effects” of the pandemic, may also have slowed things down.

The UK was not associated to the programme when it kicked off in 2021, and only agreed association last year. This could have made grant approvals more complex, as could Switzerland’s continued lack of association, the report suggests.

MEPs and research bodies have also warned about the bureaucratic impact of the “do no significant harm” principle, which asks some recipients of EU money to prove they won’t damage the environment.

However, this principle largely affects other parts of the programme, typically clusters 4-6, said Dėlkutė-Morgan. “In conversations with stakeholders it never came up as an obstacle or a burden.”

Positive signs

Some good signs emerge from the analysis. Success rates have marginally improved, up by two percentage points in cluster 1, six in cluster 2, and four in cluster 3.

Across all three clusters, survey respondents are divided on whether the effort to apply to Horizon Europe is worth the chances of success. Of respondents, 18% said the work involved in an application was “not at all” proportional to the potential rewards, while 35% said it was, to a “very large” or “large” extent.

But other survey questions suggested the majority see the paperwork involved as a necessary evil. Most applicants, even those who are unsuccessful, agree that the work involved in an application is “proportionate to the complexity of the proposed project”.

The report also shows that as consortia get bigger, the application burden balloons. Coordinators of small consortia, of up to 14 partners, spent a median average of 36-45 person days on their applications. For coordinators of projects with more than 31 partners, that jumped to 56-65 partners.

“The more partners the more time it takes to develop that proposal,” said Dėlkutė-Morgan. “Most of the burden falls on the coordinators.”

On average, 6-10% of grants are spent on administrative tasks, the report says. But one in ten projects spend more than a fifth of the money on administration.

Consultants

The analysis also tries to put some figures on how much is spent by applicants on consultants – widely used by universities and firms to navigate the complex application process.

The report found that 17% of applicants used consultancies. The median upfront consultancy fee for consortia was €7,500, and €2,000 for single beneficiaries. Extrapolating from the data, this means about 0.2% of Horizon Europe’s budget has been spent on these upfront consultancy fees.

However, the report acknowledges this does not take into account success fees, in which consultancies often take a cut of a grant if they win. These fees range from 3-7% of the grant total, or take the form of a set fee of a few thousand euros.

A Commission official played down the significance of the report as “preliminary findings”, pointing out that this is one of five different analyses focusing on different parts of Horizon Europe, which will all feed into a more comprehensive mid-term assessment next year.

“We will consider all the evidence and summarise it in a staff working document and report which should be published in the first quarter of 2025,” the official said.