Point of View: Britain profits from EU research budget

If Britain left the EU, Bristol University alone would lose £10 million of research funding. UK universities and research centres as a whole would lose almost £850 million a year.

That would be a massive blow to our centres of scientific excellence. British universities are one of the shining stars of our economy, famous world-wide for the quality of their teaching and enquiry. And with almost half of all EU research projects in the last spending period involving a UK team (more than any other EU country), we benefit more than anyone else from this budget.

Here’s a statistic you don’t often see in the Daily Mail: for every £1 we put in to the EU research pot we get £1.40 back.

Funding research programmes at EU level is common sense. Instead of each national government deciding on what the big challenges are and duly allocating public money – and duplicating that work 28 times, across each member state – we pool the money at EU level, coordinate research efforts and share the fruits of that work across the continent. It saves a lot of money overall – and we get more bang for our buck.

Finding new cures for epidemic diseases that are becoming more and more prevalent, or coming up with pioneering new forms of low-cost, sustainable transport and energy are things everyone in Europe can benefit from. There is no point in 28 different research teams doing the same stuff at the same time – we have to get together, bounce ideas off eachother and divvy up the work.

To cite just a few examples from the last spending round, in my own constituency of South West England, £2.4 million went to Bristol University for research into future aircraft design and £3.5 million for quantum mechanics. The University of Exeter got £3 million for research into flood resilience and £2.5 million for diabetes.

Our scientists are clearly so good we even get research grants on topics that aren’t exactly a local concern – such as the £4 million grant Bristol got for work understanding the signs of imminent volcanic eruptions.

The EU’s future research budget between now and 2020 (called Horizon 2020) was voted on in committee in the European Parliament just last week. Lib Dems MEPs have not been hanging about – we have guaranteed that £2.3 billion of EU research money will go to small businesses, the engines of out-of-the-box thinking and innovation.

We have cut red tape by making it simpler and easier for organisations to apply for EU funding and we have cut the average time it takes to apply and get a grant from 12 to 8 months. Money becomes much less useful if it takes a year of endless form-filling for it to come through.

But Roger Helmer MEP, UKIP’s representative on the committee, didn’t even bother to turn up for the vote last week. As a democratically elected representative you would think he would be there voting every thing down – doing his bit for his voters – but apparently not.

EU research funding is a crucial way of making savings and enhancing scientific progress across the continent. The UK benefits massively from the fund, and the anti-Europeans in the Tories and UKIP would be fools to exclude our scientists from it. Yet another reason why, when it comes to the EU, the Liberal Democrats are, in Nick Clegg’s words,’the party of in‘.

Sir Graham Watson is a Liberal Democrat MEP for the South West of England. Follow him on Twitter: @grahamwatsonmep