Brexit may put EU research funds of around £1 billion at risk
A referendum is being held on Thursday, 23 June to decide whether Britain should leave or remain in the European Union. Brexit is a word that has been used as a shorthand way of saying the UK leaving the EU – merging the words Britain and exit to get Brexit, in a same way as a Greek exit from the EU was dubbed Grexit in the past.
A new study has warned that a British vote to leave Europe Union would put almost £1 billion in EU research funds to Britain at risk. According to research company Digital Science, competitive research funding from the EU and European Research Council to Britain amounted to £967 million (1.24 billion euros, $1.39 billion) in 2015.
Britain is the second largest recipient of EU research funds after Germany, receiving £8.04 billion in the past decade compared to £8.34 billion for Germany.
This represents 7.4 percent of Britain’s net contribution to the EU budget over the same period.
The report authors said the extent of EU funds concealed the fact that, despite its world-class reputation, Britain does not invest as much in research as other competitors.
Germany
spent 2.85 percent of GDP on research in 2013, according to the latest figures from the World Bank, while Britain spent just 1.63 percent.“EU funds have been used to prop up and cover systemic issues with how we chose to fund research in the UK both at a governmental and corporate level,” said Daniel Hook, managing director of Digital Science.
“Brexit, and the loss of EU funding for the UK’s research base, represents a number of severe threats to leading British success stories in the research sector, unless the UK government makes up the shortfall,” he added.
More than £36m in EU grants went to University College London, Newcastle University and Sheffield University for cancer research in the past ten years, money that would not easily be found elsewhere. “The European research council is a tremendous source of funding for UK cancer research projects that might not otherwise be funded,” said Tariq Enver, director of the UCL Cancer Institute. The money funds basic science, but also collaborations across Europe that allow world-class facilities to share their expertise and work on complex problems, such as rare childhood cancers, that single institutes and even countries cannot easily take on, he said.
According to the report, the EU has stumped up 62% of public money for UK nanotechnology research, where Cambridge University, Glasgow University, and the Cheshire firm, CTech Innovation, are major beneficiaries. The loss of EU funds would have serious impacts elsewhere, with grants from Brussels amounting to 53% of public money for forestry research; 67% for evolutionary biology studies, and 94% for economics research.
“The UK is tremendously successful in winning money from the EU,” said Hook. “But our success has made it dependent on that stream of funding now. And that is something that the UK government needs to consider carefully, whatever happens after June 23rd.”
