What’s going on with Horizon then?

Pre brexit Britain was a major player in the programme contributing 13% of the 95bn euro budget. “Great” I thought as I read the article but then it occured to me that £2.6bn wasn’t much of a contribution.

So Britian is back in, good, but only contributing a quarter of the money, so how back in is it?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/07/horizon-brexit-eu-science-rishi-sunak

Think that’s simply a per year versus per program (5y) confusion.

yep yearly its the same, i believe its gone up a bit

we are only associate members though so losing influence, but still a huuuuge relief to uk research

and of course the damage has been done these past few years (eveb before grace period ended we lost grants due to uncertainty.shows how desperate Sunak is, a lot of brexiteers frothing about it but were slowly sliding back in.

Thank you, that explains it, all good then.

Does it still mean British (based) scientists can’t be leads or is associate a full equivalence for grant applications?

it’s odd one really can’t see them getting grants above and beyond the 2.6b as eu governments will get it in the neck from their own side. And if that means greater freedoms for uk scientists in the eu where the **** are mine!

Yes I think they can, though not seen the details

But I believe we can only apply for the ERC grants NOT the Innovation council grants which tend to be more technical , so its definitely not as good as full membership

Have personal experience of this as my previous lab we were unable to apply as the lead team in collaboration with a Dutch & Itallian labs as even in the grace period , was a massive PITA

Great news about Horizon and Copernicus – provided the deal is ratified by EU member states.
It then seems perverse that the UK didn’t attempt to rejoin Euratom and intend to go it alone – except for nuclear fusion research.

Good news.

“We have something not as good as membership but better than nothing” is genuinely something to cheer these days. Let’s hope we get more chances to do this in the coming years… a long slow steady improvement on the new status quo but not as good as what we threw away… is still positive. That’s what rebuilding relationships looks like.

Euratom

No, you’re a Tom

<span style=”color: #000000; font-family: Roboto, ‘Helvetica Neue’, Arial, ‘Noto Sans’, sans-serif, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ‘Segoe UI’, ‘Apple Color Emoji’, ‘Segoe UI Emoji’, ‘Segoe UI Symbol’, ‘Noto Color Emoji’;”>Great news about Horizon and Copernicus – provided the deal is ratified by EU member states.</span>

How much is this going to cost us, vs what we paid to be in the EU before we left?

My understanding is that we’ll be paying less and getting less. It is very fair towards us. Limited by what our government is prepared to accept and do, not the EU pushing to get a better deal out of us.

That might be “your understanding” but how much is the UK actually paying for this access?

I’m not questioning whether it’s VFM etc, but looking at in the context of how much we use to pay IN TOTAL to be in the EU and with access to Horizon etc.

IIRC, 2 billion a year compared to about 17 billion a year in the past.

Obviously we’re not getting the same back from that… not even close.

It’s better than no involvement; an essential step in rebuilding.

We’ll be paying about the same as we get back. There are mechanisms to prevent a big discrepancy.

A big difference with previously is that we used to get a lot more out than our input into  the programme. Another is that the visa requirements will be a pain in the arse for all concerned. Most of these projects are international in nature.

£2.6bn from another source, and then add in the £650m for nuclear – equals £3.2bn…

https://www.science.org/content/article/uk-finally-rejoins-horizon-europe-research-funding-scheme#:~:text=The%20U.K.%20government%20announced%20this,the%20EU%20in%20early%202020.

And it was £9bn in 2019, not £17bn.

https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/

Is this why we never hear anymore about how much we use to spend to be in the EU, because even the hardest-of-thinking have worked out it was bloody good value?

It was amazing value. But also big numbers that people don’t deal with in their day to day lives. It really wasn’t understood by many people, they only heard big (to them) costs and were easily led (lied to) as regards the very real benefits and their dependancy on cooperation and coordination.

Did I miss Sunak telling us that the UK will be spending almost a 1/3 of what the entire EU bill use to be, JUST to re-join a science program?

It’s a classic “good news, but brexit good news” story. Really glad it’s happening and in isolation it’s a good thing but as soon as you look at it compared to what we had before it’s still a bad outcome. Plus as mentioned above, it does nothing to undo the harm of the gap, which might have been avoided completely and certainly could have been reduced and managed better. How much of that was incompetence, how much was zealotry and how much was just bloody optics, who even knows?

(I didn’t work in research at the uni, but it was sort of adjacent to my job since I did student recruitment, and the spell when we were still in Horizon but we might as well not have been because for all forward planning purposes we were out, was proper brexit dystopia nonsense. Politicians saying “nothing’s happened yet, it’ll be fine” while huge amounts of work just went in the bin)

Good news indeed. Not as good as it was but another one that feels that this is indicative of the ‘out but starting to move back towards’ process. Also at the risk of starting the same argument again, why being out is crap but we can still make the best of it now.

On the getting back more than you get in. I understand the philosophy but it doesn’t always wash. To me the benefit is the collaborative angle, and if we can move faster / discover things sooner as a result of the work of other, potentially more talented* researchers in other countries I don’t really mind who does the research and gets the larger share of the money. That’s what collaborative synergies are. If we wanted to get out what we put in / have absolute control, then just fund internal research…… but then you miss out on collaboration.

* Yes, there were times when we probably did get more because for all our faults we are/were still one of the bigger players with better facilities and equipment in Europe – so others were benefiting from us. Others have caught up, not least because we have lost some very talented researchers in the past few years to Europe because they were losing their ability to collaborate. I know both sides were part of the argument over the GFA, but if only that could have been avoided / sorted sooner. Bojo and reneging on agreements be damned.

Paying more for less.

Brexit bonus!

BTW, for those with a genuine work interest in this (rather than passing public interest) there’s a KTN webinar next week.

Association to Horizon Europe – Information Webinar

Meh, my driving licence is  now not recognised in Spain, so no more driving for me until they rubber stamp my visa.

I’m not the only one in this situation, luckily Mrs DoD has a visa and can drive or that would have made life hard.

good old Brexit(UK recognises spanish licences which seems a tad unfair ) and I still can’t come home without losing my residency application.

Bitten by the unintended consequences of Brexit.

I rode Lon Las Cymru last week. Wales used to be littered with signs proclaiming ‘This project part financed by the European Development Fund ‘. They’ve all been taken away. It’s almost like they don’t want  people to be reminded of what they’ve lost.

More like they’ve been stolen. There’s still lots around, especially on industrial buildings and large road projects, and some new ones are going up for the current Heads of the Valley section as that’s using the last of the EU funds to get it completed.

Some groups are seemingly massively offended by the signs, have been for a long time, so they get vandalised or stolen on a pretty regular basis.

Surely you should have handed in your British driving licence and exchanged it for a Spanish one long ago dudeofdoom. The two years period you could continue to drive in Spain on a British licence was reduced to six months for non EU nationals the day the UK left the union. However they didn’t apply that until March this year which is why six months later your licence is no longer valid.

Either you’re a resident under the withdrawal agreement terms in which case you need a Spanish licence or you’re British and visit as a tourist for up to 90 days a year. 30 odd years ago when I applied for a French carte de séjour I had a year in which to exchange my licence for a French one so the date on it was just under a year after the one on the carte de séjour – no problems. Britain still recongnises my French licence so it’s obvious to have a licence for where I’m resident – home.

Either you’re a resident under the withdrawal agreement terms in which case you need a Spanish licence or you’re British and visit as a tourist for up to 90 days a year.

Or… they haven’t yet been able to satisfy the residency terms, but live in Spain. Not unusual. Application pending… once it’s sorted… swap the license (and drive to the UK to see people again).

I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it is from previous posts.

Or… they haven’t yet been able to satisfy the residency terms, but live in Spain. Not unusual. Application pending… once it’s sorted… swap the license (and drive to the UK to see people again).

Yep, pretty much this 🙂

They initially didn’t believe I was living here,as I paid no bills,the concept of paying the wife housekeeping seemed an alien concept.

The residency requirements also seemed to randomly change in each region and it’s a system designed to take months which is taking years and I’m not the only person stuck in this grey area.

Either you’re a resident under the withdrawal agreement terms in which case you need a Spanish licence or you’re British and visit as a tourist for up to 90 days a year

or your a legal,illegal alien tax paying resident unable to join the Spanish cycling federation or drive anything requiring a licence and have no voting rights apparently 🙂

not a fan of vox popping (to easy to edit to match your agenda) but i thought the issues being stated

was interesting

seems they were keen to over egg the pudding

Dyson called a hypocrite over Brexit by the Mirror, takes Mirror to court and loses. Oh dear.

Sir James Dyson loses libel claim against Daily Mirror publisher

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-67589147

what is it with these thin skinned sociopaths and their egos 😕

a personal attack on all that I have done and achieved in my lifetime and is highly distressing and hurtful

suck it up leaver

“Scheming EU countries leave UK out of ‘landmark’ transport plans as map reveals betrayal”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1849136/eu-countries-britain-transport

“The UK has been left out of major trans-European transport projects that the EU is expected to approve. The trans-European transport network (TEN-T) regulatory framework agreement between the European Parliament and the European Council was approved earlier this week by the European Commission.”

WE also now have EU nationals that completed all the paperwork to stay being deported as once they had completed said paper work the government changed the stuff needed and didn’t tell anyone

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/26/italian-woman-facing-removal-from-uk-despite-permanent-residency-card-brexit

“Removing red tape” = new life changing red tape.

.

some latest Brexit Polling. 

doesn’t seem to be particularly popular 😕

yeah about as popular as you’d expect