Parliamentary committees vote against diverting funds, writes Alison Goddard.
The Horizon 2020 programme should not be cut to pay for a European Fund for Strategic Investments, according to two committees in the European Parliament. University-based researchers have been lobbying for months against plans by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, to switch funding out of existing programmes to pay for the initiative, reports Research Europe, our sister publication. Indeed a large delegation of British university leaders visited Brussels last week to press the point. However the European Commission insists that universities welcome the creation of a strategic investment fund; in a letter to the Financial Times, Jyrki Katainen, its vice-president, argues that universities need more than just grants to attract private funding and that the strategic investment fund could pay for the modernisation of laboratories and equipment. British universities are particularly hostile to the proposed changes because they do particularly well at winning research funding from Europe through the Horizon 2020 programme.
There is no other significant higher education-related news in today’s newspapers or diary.
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