Over the horizon
In the political turmoil of the last week, the UK seems to have lost its science minister. Our main political advocate for research and development has left the field, and at the time of writing nobody has been appointed to replace him. George Freeman’s important duties are being temporarily covered by others in the ministerial team.
In this nightwatchman period before the selection and installation of a new PM, and with UK science policy losing some political razzmatazz in this post-Cummings era, there is apparently little opportunity for glory or favour in filling the role. And with a three-year Spending Review settlement for R&D now broadly allocated, and with the 2020 R&D Roadmap and 2021 Innovation Strategy now passing into routine implementation, you’d think there could be a case for waiting it out.
Except for one big problem: Horizon Europe.
The political realities of Horizon association
As anyone reading this should be aware, Horizon Europe is the EU’s flagship, multi-year, multi-pillar funding framework for R&D. Its predecessor framework programmes represented strikingly good value for the UK as a member state of the bloc: we won considerably more funding from Horizon 2020 than we had any right to, given our relative contribution via the EU’s multiannual financial framework. And we became particularly accustomed to benefitting from some of its niche elements, including the European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions: highly competitive (and therefore prestigious) grant awards for research and training.
Such awards support the inflow and outflow of exceptional talent from our research-performing institutions, enhancing their attractiveness and global relevance. For British universities, the UK’s continued membership of Horizon Europe, as an “associate member”, has therefore been among their key asks of any form of Brexit. The sector has lobbied hard and effectively.
During the Cummings days, when Downing Street had made backing exceptional scientific genius a primary purpose of statecraft, there was tentative support for association. Indeed, I recall Dom saying in a key meeting about Horizon that science was the kind of area where we should be friendly and cooperative with the Europeans – citing particle physics at CERN as something that should obviously continue.1
No matter that he hadn’t examined the detail, including the possibility of continued participation as a non-associated third country, or that the humungous spending delta between that and full association had not yet become clear. BEIS officials and ministers seized upon the steer, and with their repeated reassurances to the sector that association remained the top priority of the government, the negotiating position was set. You could almost hear the French government chuckling into their chardonnay.
(The signs were already there that joining any EU programme wouldn’t be easy. Theresa May had already thrown her toys out of her pram over EU constraints placed on our future participation in the Galileo satellite programme. That episode had precipitated what one space agency official colourfully described as a “relentless campaign of Parisian dickbaggery” that has continued to this day. But our exposure to monkey business in space policy is a story for another blog post.)
More importantly, despite the supposed unanimous backing in cabinet for association to Horizon Europe to be included in the UK-EU trade and cooperation agreement, some in the UK government have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that we should hand over billions of pounds of science and technology funding to a foreign power. The suggestion that we fund our UK R&D instead had obvious political appeal.
In late 2019 it became clear that the Commission would be charging Salt Bae steak prices for the hamburger of association, just so our UK scientists could pick the ERC sesame seeds off the top of the bun. The Treasury position hardened. The Foreign Office were incredulous.2 Even in BEIS, where the full-benefits-of-international-collaboration assumptions had been dialled up to the max, Horizon Europe was judged as barely worth it for the UK when compared with even a simply sketched ‘Plan B’.
Ministers took the decision to associate largely to avoid the disruption of pivoting into the unknown – but it was a decision taken through gritted teeth.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst
Of course, in the uncertainties of no-deal Brexit planning, contingency work had already been done to map out the path away from Horizon. Guarantees had been put in place to protect grantees from losing funding in the event we crashed out of Europe without a deal, and a ministerial intervention had led to Adrian Smith and Graeme Reid’s report into what a future outside Horizon Europe might look like.
The Smith-Reid report’s ideas were only ever going to be illustrative of the kind of response that the UK might make to the cataclysmic decision not to associate. At the time, such a decision would have represented a serious discontinuity in arrangements – the sector could not countenance it, and stakeholders were privately telling me they’d been urging Adrian and Graeme not to make the recommendations too attractive. Nonetheless, the Smith-Reid report provided several important steers that eventually made it into the R&D Roadmap, particularly around how a new flagship Discovery Fund might be constructed to occupy the space left by leaving the ERC.
But there were two crucial steers in the text that were central to ministerial thinking about non-association scenario. First, should the UK not associate, there ought to be an immediate programme to protect and stabilise the system from the consequent shock. Secondly, the UK should set out a vision for UK R&D that could deliver successes in the new context outside Horizon.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge between then and now. But I believe these two steers remain critically important to how we might collectively navigate the next few months.
What now?
Well, firstly, I think it’s fair to say that while the sector is probably not quite ready to admit publicly that association to Horizon is now off the table, the majority of us have accepted this grim reality in private.
Everything to do with Europe is political, and it should be patently obvious that we cannot be successfully associating with one hand while legislating with the other to break our treaty commitments in Northern Ireland.
The EU punished the Swiss for far less.
Wishing that the French will somehow magically let us in is now foolish, because wishful thinking turns us away from implementing the protection and stabilisation needed to counter the effects of non-association that have already emerged, and are now continuing unmitigated.
Can anything replace Horizon Europe? Well, nothing can substitute for the uniquely attractive ERC – the totemic yet quite minor tail that has wagged the whole dog of association. But one doesn’t buy an eye-wateringly expensive house just because one likes the nice fig tree in the garden. If we think our ERC winners are so brilliant then we could just fund them ourselves.
It is of course more complicated than that, and Horizon association buys us more than access to ERC grants and MSCA fellowships. But the UK government has done considerable work behind the scenes on a comprehensive package of alternative investments that would, in their own right, represent a major boost in support for UK R&D. The package helpfully includes some good transitional arrangements to help steady the ship, but there are some genuinely exciting new ideas. From what I’ve seen, this refreshed ‘Plan B’ could represent the biggest intervention in the setup of UK R&D in a generation. Former minister George Freeman deserves credit for the energy he brought to continuing this work.
More broadly, we should be looking at the full picture of what a major investment in UK R&D might achieve – and trying to influence it, if not embrace it. We should start by urging the government to ditch the language of ‘Plan B’ with its connotations of inferiority. With some imagination, it should be straightforward to find areas where investment, properly shaped and targeted by our community, could deliver major benefits – to UK research, to innovation, to regional growth, to a more competitive economy, to our global links outside Europe, and to our collective health, security and prosperity. There ought to be an opportunity to give our input and we cannot miss it.
But to seize the benefits of new investment when pressure on public finances is increasing and political rhetoric is hardening, we need strong and committed advocates in government. Without a science minister to make the case, to conclude the tricky negotiations with the Treasury and set out a compelling vision and plan for how we thrive outside Horizon Europe, it’s entirely possible that this particular opportunity to shape the future of UK R&D will stay out of reach.
And that would be bad news for us all.
CERN, of course, is not an EU organisation, and our continued participation in its particle physics experiments was never in question.
There is a school of thought that says that then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was so incensed by the BEIS position on Horizon that he exacted his revenge by cutting the R&D ODA budget to the bone. I don’t really buy this, but given the ghastly consequences of the ODA cuts it is interesting to ask now whether we’d have preferred things to turn out differently.