Low support for R&D in EU budget would be ‘terrible mistake’, warns Bourguignon
The interim president of the European Research Council, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, has said he and the European research community are “furious” about the direction of negotiations on the 2021-27 EU budget, in which national leaders have sought what he described as “stagnant” funding for R&D.
“We are furious because we know this approach is wrong,” Bourguignon told the European Parliament research committee on 7 September.
Acknowledging the disappointment of committee members with national leaders’ approach to the negotiations, he added: “Believe me, the scientific community is even more disappointed because, to make a difference in the world, which is the goal of many scientists, we need appropriate means.”
In July, national leaders agreed they want to allocate €80.9 billion to the 2021-27 EU R&D programme, Horizon Europe. This was down from the €94.4bn proposed by the European Commission in May, and far below the €120bn sought by the Parliament and many research organisations.
The Parliament has said it wants to convince national leaders to increase their allocation for R&D over the coming weeks. On 8 September, one of the lead MEPs on the Horizon Europe legislation, Christian Ehler, said at a conference organised by Science Business that he was “sure there won’t be a deal with the Parliament without raising the R&D budget”, although he warned that the negotiations were “complex”.
Negotiations on the budget are yet to allocate funding within Horizon Europe to each of its different instruments. Bourguignon said the “absolute minimum” that should be allocated to the European Research Council was the €16.6bn in inflation-adjusted prices proposed by the Commission in 2018, when the overall Horizon Europe budget was proposed to be €94.1bn. A “legitimately ambitious goal” would be €19.9bn, he said.
Bourguignon said he understood why national leaders were tempted to focus on short-term spending priorities in light of the Covid-19 pandemic but warned this would be a “terrible mistake”, as the pandemic had proved “the importance of preparedness built over the long term”.
More than 180 ERC projects worth roughly €340 million had been found to be “highly relevant” to the pandemic, despite having been funded before Covid-19 arose, he said, such as projects on disease modelling and diagnostic tools.
In addition, he warned that industry “will be strongly tempted for the years to come to reduce, and probably drastically, its investment in research because it has to focus on saving jobs” as a result of the pandemic. “The only way out of this reduction is to have the public sector step in,” he said.
The remarks received a warm response from other research leaders. Thomas Estermann, director of governance, funding and public policy development at the European University Association, said Bourguignon’s speech sent a “clear message” to politicians.