Brussels, 23/09/2015 (Agence Europe) - Budget cuts in the research field crystallised the debates between MEPs and the Director General for Research and Innovation at the European Commission, Robert-Jan Smits, during the presentation of the initial results from Horizon 2020. These debates were held at the European Parliament's industry and energy committee (ITRE) premises on Monday 21 September.
During his introduction, the Director-General welcomed the high number (65,000) of proposals submitted to the European Commission for the new period. Nonetheless, at the same time, he indicated that his main worry was the considerable quantity of dossiers that needed to be tackled, given that the budget available is declining. He had already touched on this concern more than a year ago (see EUROPE 11018). It is for this reason that the project acceptance rates are 14% instead of the 20% set out in the Seventh Framework Programme, he explained.
During the talks, Christian Ehler (EPP, Germany) highlighted the need to strengthen the “backloading” and focus on the payments at the end of the budgetary year, in order to be able to fund current projects. He argues that they needed to strike the right balance between budgetary cuts and research. Hans-Olaf Henkel MEP (ECR, Germany) raised questions about the proportion of the budget allocated to human resources at the European Commission and the agencies managing the calls for candidacies and payments. Philippe De Backer (ALDE, Belgium) asked whether the way in which calls for tender were drafted was the reason for the high level of inflation in the number of projects submitted.
The Director confirmed that there was a shortfall of €1 billion to honour the payment appropriations and that in order to achieve this goal, the Commission was proceeding to a postponement of the goals, as well as reduction in pre-financing rates. He also pointed out that there was still €9 billion to pay for the Seventh Framework Programme. He warned that “It's rather like using a credit card but the bill still has to be paid”. He did, however, indicate that collective research was not suffering from this situation for the time being.
In response to the MEP from the ECR, he asserted that resource management “had never been better than it was today”, mainly because of the strict division of labour between DG Research and Innovation, locales which defines the policies and programming and the Executive Research Agency (ERA), which is involved in making the payments. The director took a rather cautious line, however, with regard to performance-based funding and in the science field asserted “sometimes, when there is no result, this is already a result”.
He also highlighted the two-stage procedure involved in project selection, which helped reduce the number of candidacies through an initial selection based on short dossiers, then the second stage based on a more detailed presentation. He argued that the time given to processing projects had therefore been drastically reduced and effectively meant more time obtained for researchers.
With the announcement of the Juncker Plan, the debate became somewhat sharper. Around €2.2 billion had been planned from Horizon 2020, to the benefit of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) and the public guarantee for the investment plan, which now stands at €8 billion in total (see EUROPE 11323). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)