UK membership of the EU’s multi-billion-euro Horizon Europe scheme has been in limbo for several months, as the European Commission prioritised the applications of other countries and waited to see how the situation around the Northern Ireland Protocol would develop.
Initially, top EU officials insisted that applications to join the research programme and the bloc’s satellite network, Copernicus, would not be affected by parallel talks on the finer points of implementing Brexit.
However, the situation has rapidly evolved and the UK government is reportedly preparing an alternative to Horizon Europe, known as the ‘Discovery Fund’, according to The Telegraph.
That homegrown scheme will certainly fail to replicate the benefits of the pan-EU programme, given that it will cut British researchers off from projects that involve thousands of other institutions and research bodies.
Much like the UK government’s EU-substitute initiatives, such as the ‘Turing scheme...