HORIZON BLOG: Research and innovation in the next EU budget (Archived)

At the budget committee meeting today, MEPs expressed disappointment about the lack of progress made in EU budget negotiations at the European Council last Friday.

Following last week’s summit, European Council President Charles Michel announced he will start “real negotiations” with the member states and come up with a concrete proposal before the next summit in July. With only six months left until the start of the new budget cycle, many MEPs believe the Council’s approach lacks urgency.

“We’ve been waiting since 14 November 2018 for the Council,” said MEP Jose Manuel Fernandes. “Once again the Parliament is the one showing how responsible and decided we are.”

Prolonged negotiations are bad for the Parliament: the longer the Council takes to agree on the budget, the less time MEPs will have to discuss whether they accept the proposal. Some MEPs warned the rush to agree on the budget at the Parliament may result in a reduced and unsatisfactory budget for the next seven years.

“Urgency cannot justify giving up the Parliament’s prerogatives,” said MEP Johan van Overtveldt, who chaired the meeting. ”We will seek to significantly improve the package on the table.”

At the meeting, the MEPs also discussed the recovery loan repayment scheme and urged the European Commission to clarify where the money for the repayments will come from.

EU-LIFE, an alliance of life sciences research centres, says without a Horizon Europe budget of at least €150 billion the EU “will not have the required resources to ensure the health safety of its citizens”.

In a statement released this week, the alliance urged EU leaders to increase funding for Horizon Europe and ensure basic research plays a key role in the programme, with at least 35% of the budget dedicate to it.

“Only discovery-driven research, embedded in a strong health industry ecosystem, will bring Europe lasting – and faster – solutions to the health challenges of our society,” says the statement.

The alliance also believes Europe needs stronger coordination of research and innovation policy, better data sharing, and joint preparedness plan to be able to tackle future crises – and calls on policymakers to ensure these measures are in place.  

The European Central Bank (EIB) is set to lend the European Spallation Source an additional €50 million, increasing its total financing of the research centre to €150 million.

The new funding will help build the multi-disciplinary research centre in Sweden and Denmark, with construction set to be finished in 2025.

Spallation sources scatter neutrons, offering the possibility to study material structures and motions at an atomic or molecular level. The European Spallation Source will be based on world’s biggest neutron, enabling scientists from many disciplines to investigate basic atomic structures and forces at length and time scales unachievable at other spallation sources.

The Coimbra group, a European university lobby association, calls on policymakers to strengthen investments in education and research by including funding for Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe in the EU’s recovery package.

In a statement released this week, the group expressed concern about the lack of explicit support for education and the Erasmus+ programme in the current recovery budget proposal, and reminded EU leaders that “the future of Europe will crucially depend on the support given to its young people and their commitment to the further development of Europe.”

The European University Association (EUA), Europe’s largest university lobby group, says the proposed Horizon Europe and Erasmus+ budgets are insufficient to address the EU’s recovery needs.  

In a statement published a day before EU leaders are set to discuss the new EU budget, the group calls on policymakers to increase the budget for Horizon Europe, invest more in basic research, which gets no funding under the Commission’s recovery package, and increase support for humanities and social sciences.

“The EU’s collective aspirations towards European R&I and education programmes have never been higher as they aim at fostering the green and digital transitions,” says the statement. “Budgets allocated to these policy objectives should provide the means to deliver on those ambitions.”

The group also asks policymakers to increase funding for Erasmus+ and ensure there is enough money for collaboration with countries outside the EU.

Science Europe, the association representing Europe’s major public research organisations, says EU leaders should reconsider European Commission’s budget proposal for Horizon Europe, as it could be “seriously damaging” for parts of the programme focused on blue sky research and research mobility.

According to the commission’s budget proposal released in May, most Horizon Europe programmes would lose 3.2 per cent of their budget. Meanwhile, the commission proposed to give a €13.5 billion boost from its pandemic recovery fund to the European Innovation Council and applied research in health, digital and climate.

Science Europe says the plan should be “reconsidered” so that the recovery money also reaches the coffers of European Research Council, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and research infrastructures.

In addition, Science Europe has reiterated previous calls for a €120 billion budget for Horizon Europe, a marked increase from the current proposal, which is to be discussed by EU leaders in a videoconference on Friday 19 June.

In plenary today, the European Parliament will vote on setting up new special committees on beating cancer, foreign interference in EU politics, and artificial intelligence and the digital transformation.

If established, the three groups will bring together expertise from different committees to solve pressing issues. They will make policy proposals, however, will not be able to adopt new rules themselves. For now, they will run for up to twelve months, unless their term is extended.

There will also be a vote on setting up a permanent subcommittee on tax matters under the Parliament’s ECON committee and a committee of inquiry on animal transportation, which would investigate breaches in the implementation of EU laws in member states.

The results of the votes will be out tonight at 22.15 CET.

The European Parliament’s industry committee today voted in favour of new changes to the governing rules of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

Under the new rules, the EIT’s eight public-private partnerships, the Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs), will draw up two-year plans for post-COVID recovery and adopt necessary tools to help their members adapt to new working methods.  

In total, over 600 amendments were added to the European Commission’s proposal that simplify the EIT’s financial and administrative rules, ensure more transparency, and set standards for geographical and gender balance in the work of its KICs.

Now, the Parliament will have to negotiate with the Council and the Commission to pass their amendments. “We hope that we can finalise the negotiations and keep the proposal of the Parliament in its main lines of intervention,” said MEP Maria Matias.

Ahead of the EU budget discussions in the coming weeks, Tech Tour, an investor group, published a paper suggesting the EU should invest more in taking equity stakes in SMEs to help them scale up as a way to address the current economic challenges posed by COVID-19. In the paper, the group argues SMEs will lead future job creation and innovation, and equity investments, which are more effective than loans, are essential in helping these companies grow.

The idea of the European Commission investing in company shares stirred controversy when it was first introduced a year ago. However, the scepticism has died down since, and last week the European Innovation Council announced its biggest equity investment to date, worth €174 million.

A week before European leaders are set to discuss the next EU budget, an association of big research infrastructure published a paper arguing why their labs are needed to make a success of the EU’s planned research ‘missions.’

As part of its next big R&D programme, Horizon Europe, the European Commission plans to launch five missions – big, ambitious efforts involving many researchers – such as tackling cancer and adapting to climate change. In its paper, the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) Forum details how its members “contribute to” these projects.  ERICs are big research facilities that are legally incorporated under a special EU regulation, and usually receive at least some of their funding from Horizon.