FST JOURNAL

The UK is already an exceptionally powerful international science player in its own right. Association to Horizon Europe will be an important part of our continuing international engagement. UKRI is the largest public funder of research and innovation in the UK, covering all sectors and disciplines, including innovation. It will have a key role in enabling and coordinating UK participation in Horizon. UKRI’s five year strategy, Transforming Tomorrow Together, has brought the Research Councils and their independent missions into a single body which has a capacity to operate in ways not dissimilar from the unified vision of Horizon Europe.

The UKRI strategy encompasses a number of strategic themes, which again are comparable with some of the Horizon programme’s mission areas. These allow us to concentrate on ways in which we can fund interdisciplinarity and the breaking down of silos between disciplines.

International collaboration

International collaboration is so important because it makes science better. Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) shows that when we collaborate, then our research is more widely read, more widely used and has greater impact. Key UK strategies set out in Global Britain in a Competitive Age, the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy demonstrate that we do this not out of pure altruism but because it makes our science and our research ecosystem better.

Internationalism is part of the UKRI brand and mission. We have investigator-led international collaboration, as well as dedicated international funding to address gaps and opportunities. The new International Science Partnerships Fund was constructed in part to make sure that our global ambitions were sustained while discussions about association with Horizon continued. It remains an important strategic investment in the context of our scientific relationship with Europe and the rest of the world.

UKRI has a number of overseas offices, including the UK Research Office (UKRO) in Brussels which will be supporting participation. There are also very strong UKRI research facilities across the world, in Antarctica and the Arctic Circle, The Gambia and Uganda, for instance, as well as major infrastructure investments and research ships. Without such an extensive ecosystem, we would not be able to forge the ongoing collaborations that will allow leading-edge science to take place.

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Since 2018, UKRI-funded researchers have collaborated with 181 countries, involved in research grants worth £2.3 billion in total. Some 33% of our funding is international, with over 6,000 collaborating organisations overseas, and £900 million is already committed in 2023-24 to our international partnerships. We have retained – and will continue to build – our international capacity.

The Guarantee

The UK has in place a Guarantee to smooth the transition into association with Horizon Europe. That Guarantee was a critical arrangement agreed with ERC and delivered by UKRI to cover UK participation in projects prior to association. All calls in Horizon’s Work Programme 24 and onwards are covered by the association agreement. Those in Work Programme 21, 22 and 23 are covered – as far as UK participation is concerned – by the Guarantee.

In order to maximise UK engagement in Horizon Europe, UKRI’s Brussels presence via the UK Research Office (UKRO) will have a leading role in supporting organisations and helping them understand what opportunities are available. That is not just to assist universities but also, critically, businesses. With regard to innovation, the UK national contact points and Innovate UK are also working to incentivise businesses: the mechanisms are not quite the same as for universities.

The Guarantee has, critically, ensured that there has been continuing involvement through which grants have been assessed by Horizon Europe but funded by UKRI. As of 31 December 2023, we have awarded almost 2,900 grants worth over £1.5 billion to UK-based researchers and innovators. We did not stop being part of Europe and we did not stop doing excellent research.

It is important we continue to support and foster success in future years. Equally, when Government legitimately asks for evidence of the effect of participation and the resulting successes, we must not just count the number of applications. The critical statistic will be the excellence of the research that is carried out. There is no value in a large number of bad applications, there is only value in successful applications.

The future

The reason we can be confident that UK research and innovation will bounce back to the level of engagement – and more – that we had with previous programmes is that through the intervening period we have maintained our mechanisms for international collaboration. These include: policies on international co-investigators and visiting researchers; reciprocal agreements with, for instance, Norway and Switzerland; lead agency agreements; joint thematic calls; partnership building mechanisms; fellowships; and also multilateral policy engagement.

It is also important to bear in mind that association with Horizon is not purely about Europe: it is a partnership with other countries outside Europe that also participate in this framework. Our multilateral policy engagement continues with the Global Research Council, the OECD Global Science Forum and Science Europe.

The success of the UK has depended on the strength of the UK domestic capacity and the strength of its broad international collaboration. Through the period of uncertainty, we collectively maintained those international collaborations and our domestic strength. For us to be successful in the future we must continue to use a strong domestic ecosystem to support stable and meaningful international collaboration.