LONDON — U.K. and EU negotiators have agreed a draft deal on Britain’s re-entry into the Horizon Europe research program after months of hard-fought talks.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will be presented with the draft deal by officials this weekend ahead of a crunch meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen next Tuesday where the final agreement may be confirmed, two U.K. government officials — granted anonymity to speak about sensitive discussions — said.
One of the officials said Britain will re-join Horizon Europe, which has a €95.5 billion budget for the period 2021-27, and the Copernicus Earth observation program — but not Euratom’s nuclear energy R&D scheme, which both the British government and the U.K. nuclear sector consider “poor value for money,” the official said.
Britain formally left all three schemes when it quit the EU in January 2020, and negotiations to re-associate as a third country stalled amid the bitter row over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Talks finally restarted in earnest in March, after London and Brussels struck the Windsor Framework deal. Expectations were high of a swift resolution after the Commission confirmed it would not require the U.K. to pay backdated participation fees for the two years of the Horizon program it had missed.
But the U.K. government pressed for a bigger discount, arguing the two-year hiatus had left British-based researchers and businesses in a weakened position compared to their peers across Europe because they were prevented from leading multi-country research consortia, and had already changed their research plans due to the uncertainty.
British civil servants produced modeling to estimate how much U.K.-based scientists are likely to win back in grant funding in the final five years of the scheme, and requested a further rebate to help fill the gap. In the meantime, U.K. ministers floated a domestic “Plan B” last year known in Whitehall as Pioneer.
The negotiations on Britain’s contributions concluded late on Tuesday evening, the first official said, with the Treasury on board with the proposal. They declined to give exact details of the financial arrangement.
Sunak is expected to make a decision on whether to proceed when he studies the deal in detail this weekend, ahead of a bilateral meeting with von der Leyen in the margins of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next Tuesday.
“It’s going to be crunch time over the weekend,” said the second government official privy to the outcome of the discussions, adding that next Tuesday’s meeting would be a “critical juncture” in the discussions.
Sunak will be advised that the U.K. should join Horizon Europe and Copernicus in January 2024, and the Commission is believed to be on board with the date, but the first official said the date is likely to be agreed at the Tuesday meeting.
A legal text will then be drafted once the two leaders sign off on the terms of the agreement, the same official added.