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Budget change could favour R&D, Commission president says

Image: Etienne Ansotte, European Union 2019

Indication comes as MEP calls for extra help for researchers

Changes to the European Commission’s proposal for the EU’s 2021-27 budget, intended to help the bloc recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, could include a focus on research, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has indicated.

“Crucially we need to invest strategically in our future, for example for innovative research, for digital infrastructure, for clean energy, for a smart circular economy, for transport systems of the future,” von der Leyen (pictured) said on 4 April.

The budget, which is still mired in negotiations among national governments, “must be there for the time when economies weakened by the current crisis will need to spark their engines and get our unique internal market going again,” she said.

The changes the Commission will propose for ministers to consider have not yet been spelled out in detail. They were first announced in March, when von der Leyen said they would include “a stimulus package that will ensure that cohesion within the union is maintained through solidarity and responsibility”.

This emphasis on cohesion sparked concern across academia that some of the proposed research budget of €83.5 billion in 2018 prices might be reallocated. 

“Research and innovation should be an absolute top priority, as the past few weeks have proven,” the secretary-general of the League of European Research Universities, Kurt Deketelaere, said following the earlier announcement. 

The Commission proposed on 2 April that that EU member states should be able to use all their remaining cohesion funding from the 2020 EU budget to fight Covid-19, which it said amounted to about €50-60bn.

As about 30 per cent of cohesion funding supports innovation, and about 10 per cent R&D, this could mean a losses of €18bn and €6bn respectively for those activities, although spending on Covid-19 might also go on related innovation and research.

“We have also decided to put every cent of the remaining money in this year’s budget into an emergency instrument to help secure vital medical equipment and scale up testing,” von der Leyen said on 4 April.

She said on 6 April that a meeting of the Commission’s coronavirus response team, comprising commissioners with relevant responsibilities, would discuss how research can further help with Covid-19 through vaccine development and the creation of an EU data-sharing platform.

The focus on data came as members of the centre-right European People’s Party political group—which includes von der Leyen and is the largest group in the European Parliament—called for an EU-based data centre to facilitate the bloc’s management of infectious diseases.

MEP Christian Ehler, the EPP’s lead on the EU’s 2021-27 R&D programme, also called on the bloc to help researchers by “reducing administrative burdens and ensuring the continuity of employment”.