Universities want €200 billion research budget for next Horizon

Lobby groups representing leading research universities want the European Union to double the budget of its next research and innovation programme and sharpen its support towards excellent projects.

The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) and its central European sister grouping, the CE7, have set out their 10 priorities for the programme, which will run from 2028 to 2035, including a budget of €200 billion (£172 billion).

All 10 refer to excellence and hint at the globally competitive universities’ frustrations with the current Horizon Europe programme, which was allocated a budget of €95 billion in 2020 figures.

Among these are EU politicians’ enthusiasm for taking chunks out of the pot to pay for research-adjacent political projects, such as onshoring microchip manufacturing or reviving once-influential architectural styles.

Kurt Deketelaere, Leru’s secretary-general, told Times Higher Education that the European institutions should set aside more of the overall EU budget for contingencies such as pandemics or war and use that for new priorities, instead of raiding research. He said they had proved capable of ring-fencing other budget lines, like the subsidies paid to farmers through the common agricultural policy.

Jan Palmowski, secretary-general of the guild, said the €200 billion figure was based in part on an influential study by the former World Trade Organization director-general Pascal Lamy, who in 2017 called on the EU to double the budget of Horizon 2020’s successor from €80bn to €160bn.

The only time EU purse-holders have truly doubled down on research was in the heady economic days of the mid-1990s, when the 1994-98 research programme got just over €13 billion, twice that of its 1990-94 predecessor.

Research universities tend to do well in the framework programmes’ excellence-focused first pillar, with its prestigious grants from the European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.

In their statement the groups praised both and called for “an explicit disinvestment from instruments where success cannot be evidenced”. Speaking to THE, Professor Palmowski said the Horizon’s public-private partnerships were a form of funding with patchy proof of success, while Professor Deketelaere singled out the European Innovation Council, which has at times struggled to make the EU’s necessarily cautious funding machinery work like a venture capital fund, describing it’s accelerator start-up fund as “a complete disaster”.

Professor Palmowski said a sharper focus on excellence – as defined by academic communities themselves – was in part justified by the low application rates to some of Horizon’s mission-themed funding calls.

“It’s the way calls are framed,” he said. “If you take away funding from key areas of cancer research in order to put things into a cancer mission where the R&I content at the moment is not really clear to many of our cancer researchers, then that’s something we really need to discuss.”

Horizon Europe was geared to be the EU’s most global programme yet, with a catch-all category for any country to join, but which also became home for the UK and Switzerland, two of Europe’s research powerhouses.

The lobby groups have called for its successor to treat the two countries as “preferential partners” with their own special category that recognises their “long, close and trusted integration in European collaborative research and innovation”.

The European Commission is working on a midpoint review of Horizon Europe that will set the template for its successor. Other groups responded to a consultation in early 2023 to call for a €200 billion budget next time around.

Many also called for the budgets of different programme areas to be protected, while also leaving them open to moving around within areas as new research and innovation opportunities arise.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com