Explainer: Who wants what from Horizon Europe?

Last weekend the Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU released its “negotiating box” for the EU next multi-year budget. Its proposed €140bn for Horizon Europe over seven years was seen as a step back from some of the more expansive plans for the EU research programme – but this forms but one piece of a much larger budget puzzle.

Following negotiations between member states last week, the current state of play appears to be that the Irish proposal has essentially gone nowhere, with the European Council’s president, António Costa, now tasked with coming up with a (different) compromise solution which can accommodate all the different stakeholders’ desired outcomes for the next budget. A special summit at the end of November has been scheduled to try to drive agreement over the line.

In this explainer, we’ll go over where different EU member states and European research groups stand on the budget – and, in particular, Horizon Europe – as well as how things look from the UK perspective. If you’ve not been following all the twists and turns of what can be a complex and shifting picture, this will hopefully help you get up to speed.

The big budget picture

Horizon Europe is the core part of the EU’s research and innovation funding. It is delivered across three “pillars”, in the main: excellent science, industrial competitiveness, and innovation. The first pillar encompasses key programmes such as the European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).

Its budget is set over the multiannual cycle the EU follows, known as the Multiannual Financial Framework or MFF. For the 2021–27 MFF, the Horizon budget was €93.5bn. The next MFF will cover 2028–34, and it is this amount which is the subject of highly contested negotiations at the moment. It had been hoped that agreement would be reached by the end of the current year, though this is currently looking unlikely.

The headline debate about the next MFF is, in a nutshell, split between two opposed groups of countries, often known as the “frugals” and the “friends of cohesion”. The former is generally considered to be Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Austria. They supposedly prefer to be known as “modernisers” or “realists” than frugals – but they are united in wanting a relatively smaller EU budget. On the other side, the “friends of cohesion” – most other member states, essentially – want a larger budget settlement.

So far, so straightforward. But one complicating factor is that the frugals largely want the EU to invest more in competitiveness, defence, security and other modernising measures, and less in agriculture and regional development (aka cohesion).

When the Irish presidency set out its proposed compromise budget, it tried to find further cuts in the headline total (to get the frugals onboard) but also protect agriculture and cohesion spending. It was an attempt to please everyone that seems largely to have pleased no-one – and the takeaway for the research sector was that certain member states’ insistence on cuts to the budget was leading to planned investments in research, industrial competitivity, and foreign policy being sacrificed, rather than the traditional budget lines of faming and regional development which are seemingly too politically contested to be reviewed.

This is very much not in the spirit of the influential Draghi report, or in line with what the European Commission was hoping to see. The quest to find a compromise between the opposing sides is leading to a scaling back of plans to reform and modernise how the EU works and what its priorities are.

Research reaction

While it’s now thought that the Irish presidency’s proposals will need to be largely discarded, it demonstrates the challenges for those advocating for a larger Horizon Europe programme in the next MFF.

The European University Association warned that the latest proposal

“continues a trend of austerity in the MFF negotiations and suggests that traditional spending priorities, notably cohesion and agriculture, are largely being shielded from further cuts, while research, innovation and competitiveness bear a disproportionate share of the additional reductions.”

The influential Heitor export group, whose 2024 report set the foundations for much of the ambitions for large European R&I investment, called the Irish negotiating box a move in “totally the wrong direction.” The group had called for at least €220bn to be spent on the next framework programme, and argues that this proposal still stands.

Other European research groups have been equally adamant. The League of European Research Universities is pushing national governments to reverse the suggested cuts, saying that successive EU Council recommendations have gone “from bad to worse”. The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities have said that the latest proposals are “lamentable” and “unacceptable.”

The view from the UK

The UK government is unsurprisingly not providing a running commentary on its views about the next Horizon Europe, though its position paper on association from a couple of years ago suggested that its preference would be for a programme which did not have a greatly expanded budget, and was of a similar format. As we’ve suggested recently on the site, a larger overall budget will require greater UK contributions, which will necessitate a reprofiling of how the country’s R&D budget is allocated.

UK research groups are concentrating their advocacy efforts on ensuring that the UK is able to participate in the next Horizon Europe “from day one” – something potentially made more challenging if MFF negotiations stretch into 2027. Universities UK International has also recently highlighted feedback from its members showing a strong preference for remaining associated to Horizon over any alternative UK-only scheme (as was planned for when the UK originally dropped out of Horizon Europe following Brexit).

There also remains an open question about how possible “EU preference” rules might apply to the 2028–34 Horizon programme, under which organisations in member states may receive some form of prioritisation in certain projects. A recent Russell Group policy paper made the case against any such rules.

While the UK is keen to present itself as a “trusted partner” in negotiations about the shape of FP10 (as the next Horizon programme is sometimes referred to), its position outside the EU means that its influence is necessarily limited. Once the next MFF is agreed – whenever this might end up being – and the rules around the next programme are established, it’s likely that a new round of debate will commence around the UK’s participation, and where the money to pay for it will come from.

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