Q&A: Repasi calls for ‘autonomous’ ERC

The European Parliament’s research and industry committee has moved forward with proposals to create a more bottom-up Horizon Europe from 2028, against what it sees as attempts by the European Commission to retain control over the design of funding calls and to subordinate parts of the programme to industrial objectives.

René Repasi, of the Socialists and Democrats group, is the committee’s lead rapporteur for the specific programme of the next Horizon Europe, a separate piece of legislation covering implementation measures of the Framework Programme. He laid out his vision in a draft report published by the committee on March 13.

After European People’s Party MEP Christian Ehler spoke with Science|Business about his report on the main Horizon Europe legislation, it is now Repasi’s turn. He explains why the Commission should “seriously consider” making the European Research Council (ERC) an autonomous agency. He also believes that partnerships should be used in a more strategic way, that limits should be set on financing for research infrastructures, and that structural biases in evaluation processes should be addressed.

Here we reproduce an edited version of that Q&A. 

Q: In your draft report, you devoted lots of paragraphs to ensuring both the ERC and the European Innovation Council gain more autonomy. Why do you think that was needed?

A: With the little budget that we have and the low success rates in Horizon Europe, we need to make sure that excellence is without any doubt the sole evaluation criterion, because only then will we have the top researchers going through the application process. That is ensured in particular by the ERC, where experts give their name and reputation in order to justify award decisions. 

The Commission made several attempts to reduce the autonomy of the ERC. The proposed reduction of the mandate of the ERC president to one term of two years is striking. It was important for us, on the one hand, to go back to the status quo, and on the other, to signal that we are willing to go one step further and have an even stronger role for the ERC than it currently has.

Q: You also mention that the ERC president and the members of the ERC Scientific Council should be free to talk and engage openly with stakeholders. Do you have concerns regarding potential restrictions to their freedom to engage publicly? 

A: The thing is that the ERC is not a Union agency. It is part of the whole Commission body, and it is part of the hierarchy. That makes it important, even if I have heard no concrete suggestions that there are limitations, to clarify that there should be no limitations.

We are making a new law for the upcoming seven years. Maybe with the current people in power, there is no such problem, but I simply can’t exclude [problems arising in future]. Just look just across the ocean: you see how policymakers in the US are basically throwing away old taboos. Politicians of the current generation should set certain standards to shield and provide sufficient liberty to institutions that are of the utmost importance for our way forward. 

Q: ERC president Maria Leptin asked in 2025 that the ERC be established as a permanent EU body that is fully independent from the Commission. Are you thinking along the same lines?

A: Yes, and you see in my draft report and in the review clause that I have included this as a task for the Commission: to seriously consider proposing a legal act for establishing the ERC as a proper Union agency. So, I have a lot of sympathy for that. While I didn’t want to overburden the current [legislative] procedure with that sort of institutional question, I do want to make a clear sign from the [Parliament] to the Commission that this is something that we must seriously consider.

Q: You also propose the creation of sectoral plans for the ERC. Isn’t introducing a top-down policy at odds with your call for more institutional autonomy?

A: The sectoral plans are inspired by a collaborative research instrument established by former Dutch education, culture and science minister Robbert Dijkgraaf, which allows public research institutions in one specific scientific sector to cooperate. 

What Dijkgraaf had in mind was to elevate an entire science sector, at first made up of two disciplines. One was a traditional social science discipline that normally has little chance of obtaining third-party funding, and the other was a field in physics. An amount of money was made available, then the deans of the faculties of all Dutch universities had to present a research programme together. The condition was that there must be cooperation, at least between two different faculties, and that it must be something new, but on the basis of existing talent. 

If [universities] have the freedom to allocate those funds to their talent and are the ones drafting the research programme, you have a much better use of public money. You give a pot of money in order to have a bottom-up process at an early stage of programming and not at the end of the entire programming process. 

If you involve research institutions at the early stage of research programming, then you must ensure that this is peer-reviewed, top-notch excellence. And [at the EU level] only the ERC has the expert network and the experience to do this properly. 

Q: Would the ERC require additional administrative resources to manage this work? 

A: They already have peer-review expert panels, they have the techniques to do this, so that would not require additional administrative resources. You have to give some funding to it, because otherwise it won’t fly, but given that it is a change of mindset, it doesn’t need much money. It just needs a pioneering discipline to go into it as a sector and prove that it also works at the EU level. For me, this is more of a first step, a try-out, because not all sectors will participate.

Dijkgraaf started with two disciplines in order to prove whether it worked or not. And it has worked. The sectoral plans were the only thing from Dijkgraaf that survived the populist, right-wing government that followed. I fully understand that industry and the research and innovation community are wondering what these are, so I always have to explain a little bit more to avoid misunderstandings. My report is probably not the optimal translation of this idea into a legal text.

Q: Circling back to the Commission’s Horizon Europe proposal, the research community has raised many concerns regarding the incompleteness of the documents. Does the Parliament have the technical and legal capacity to fill the gaps left by those who drafted the Commission proposals in the first place? 

A: At this point, we have to make clear what the political negotiating mandate of the Parliament is on the basis of the legal text, including what we want to achieve in terms of governance. Here, I think that both draft reports send a clear enough message on how that is supposed to look. We have presented a good basis for the discussion. But the reports make it clear that if you want, politically, to avoid the European Competitiveness Fund piggybacking on Pillar 2, then you need to have a separate governance structure.

Then, the second half of the [negotiating] procedure is about finding the political common ground. And then we have sufficient legal experts in the Council, in the Parliament and in the Commission to be the honest brokers in the trialogue.

Q: We saw a preliminary reaction to your draft reports from Commission officials, who appear to be standing firm behind their proposal. What do you expect EU governments in the Council to say? Have you already tested the waters with science counsellors and research ministers?

A: The Commission’s reaction in committee made very clear that we touched upon the sore points, and it makes me personally confident that we are on the right track. Now, the Council and the Parliament have to legislate and make a decision, with the help of the Commission, which can try to influence us like any other interest group, but not undermine the policy results of the co-legislators. 

For now, it is more important where the majority lies in Parliament than what the Council thinks. Looking at the Council presidency drafts, especially for my file, there is quite some convergence at this stage, for example on the autonomy of the ERC.

Q: You write that European partnerships should be established “only in the most strategically relevant cases,” where EU action is insufficient, that the Commission should prove their added value every two years, and that their renewal should be decided on an independent evaluation. Is this a way to drastically reduce their number?

A: If you look at the existing partnerships, there are quite a lot, they are quite broad, and I’m not sure whether that’s the most efficient use of this instrument. I think it should be an instrument that is more targeted. I’m not saying that there has to be less money for partnerships, but that they should be used in a more strategic way. The whole idea of our current industrial policy is that we must focus. That’s also the logic that the European Competitiveness Fund is following, and that logic should also be translated into the partnerships as an instrument.

Q: You suggest favouring synergies with other instruments to finance research infrastructures and using EU funds to help modernise rather than build new ones. Why are you not backing the proposed 20% co-financing scheme?

A: If I look at the Heitor and Draghi reports and the amount that they think is actually needed for research and innovation, our current budget is below that. What I’m most concerned about, because of some form of mistrust built up over the last decades, is that whenever the EU tries to find some funding that isn’t available anywhere, they always cut the Horizon Europe budget instead of other funds. 

I can see the added value of spending Horizon Europe money on bricks and mortar, but there must be limits, so that things that should be financed from other sources do not piggyback on the Horizon Europe budget. 

Q: You emphasise in many amendments the importance of non-discriminatory criteria, whether they pertain to research data and outputs, peer-reviewed publications, or European partnerships. You also imply introducing elements of anonymised evaluation for individual research grants. Is this more than a preventive amendment?

A: It’s a preventive idea, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere. We have to be honest with ourselves as human beings: we have biases. The only thing we can do is be as aware of those biases as possible, but we cannot eliminate them. 

If you have an ERC advanced grants panel where 80% of the evaluators come from western European research institutions, you cannot say that there will not be a bias towards western European applicants. On the other hand, an application from an eastern European principal investigator may have a lot of references to eastern European publications that are not ranked that high because they are written in Bulgarian, for instance. 

Everywhere, you have those biases that still put certain regions in Europe at a disadvantage. So, this amendment does not refer to cases where people are consciously discriminating against anybody, it is more about structural biases. I’m convinced that if, for example, you were simply to evaluate on the basis of the research proposal alone, just the research idea and the methodology, people would be surprised about the result and the origins of the researchers and their research institutions.