Project Amber map: funded by the EU Horizon programme, which the UK has just rejoined, and led by Swansea University, the project involved researchers removing unnecessary barriers along hundreds of kilometres of European rivers.
There are glimmers of hope but the threat to research and innovation in Wales due to the loss of EU funding remains serious, writes Swansea University Vice-Chancellor Professor Paul Boyle.
There are at last some glimmers of hope for those of us seeking to protect research and innovation in Wales, following the loss of the UK’s access to European Structural and Investment Fund (ESIF) from this year.
In previous columns I have outlined in stark terms the scale of the threat, which remains grave. ESIF funds have been indispensable in supporting research and innovation in Wales and their loss continues to be of significant concern to us at Swansea University and across our sector. However, I am pleased to highlight two positive recent developments.
The first is the UK rejoining the EU’s Horizon programme as an associate member, following an agreement between the UK government and the EU.
This is long-awaited good news for researchers and scientists, and it will bring considerable social and economic benefits for universities, businesses and SMEs across the UK. With a budget of €95.5 billion, Horizon is the largest research and innovation funding programme in the world, enabling meaningful collaboration between research institutions across Europe at a scale which is vital for tackling some of the greatest challenges of our time.
Our Swansea researchers have a strong track record of securing funding from Horizon and of collaborating effectively with European colleagues. For example, through our participation in the Marie Curie Training Network, which developed technology to improve diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, and the Amber project, led by Swansea University, through which researchers removed unnecessary barriers along hundreds of kilometres of European rivers.
Despite the uncertainty over the UK’s association to Horizon since 2016, we have benefited from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) guarantee scheme to protect UK projects which have been approved for Horizon European funding, such as research in our Medical School to develop sensors for detecting biomarkers for liver cancer. With the ambiguity finally lifted, researchers across Wales can once again apply to Horizon and continue to collaborate with colleagues across Europe on transformational projects such as these.
The second piece of good news is that the UK government has recently launched a new £60 million Regional Innovation Fund (RIF) to support universities in areas with lower levels of research and development investment, following the end of ESIF funding in the UK. £3.4 million of this allocation will come to Wales.
The scale of this funding is modest and represents much less than half of the £170 million that our sector had indicated would be required to meaningfully protect ESIF-funded research and innovation activity across the UK for the next eighteen months.
However, it does indicate that UK government now acknowledges that the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) alone, which replaces ESIF, is not sufficient to support the breadth of research and innovation. It also suggests that UK government understands the need to provide ringfenced support for research and innovation at regional level, both to support its ambitious research and development priories and to protect and stimulate local economies.
Despite this good news, the threat to research and innovation posed by the loss of ESIF funding in the UK remains grave. By the end of 2023, 60 major research projects, supporting over 1,000 jobs across Wales, will have ended due to lack of funding.
The inadequacy of the UKSPF as a long-term replacement for EU Structural Funds also remains. It is administered by the UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which has no experience of managing research and innovation, and its structure renders it unsuitable for supporting high-impact research and innovation. Funding is allocated via individual local authorities and over short periods, making large-scale, cross-regional and long-term collaborative projects challenging.
So, while I welcome these positive steps in respect of Horizon and RIF, the stark reality is that at Swansea University we have lost around £25m of research funding per year from ESIF alone, which has not been replaced.
As the EU understood some time ago, the scale of a research project’s impact so often correlates with the scale of its funding. Without a long-term, fit-for-purpose regional research investment programme in the UK, our ability to deliver the kind of impact that can transform lives, societies and our planet will remain seriously impaired.