Government made “no assessment” of brain drain from Horizon lockout, but Research Professional News has
A UK minister has admitted that the government has not tracked the number of research scientists leaving the country as a result of the UK being locked out of the EU’s Horizon Europe funding programme, despite huge concerns over this ‘brain drain’.
Since the UK voted to leave the EU, it has been feared that leading researchers would be attracted to jobs abroad. The problem has been especially acute for winners of grants from Horizon’s European Research Council, who could bid for and win funding but had to leave the UK to actually claim their money from the ERC.
But Jonathan Berry, a minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said on 26 September that “the government has made no assessment of the number of research scientists leaving the UK”.
Berry was responding to a question asking how many researchers had left the UK in the past three years to take up ERC grants.
While the government has not kept track of these numbers, Research Professional News has. The latest figures RPN obtained from the ERC show that 405 UK-based researchers won grants through the ERC’s 2021 and 2022 rounds and 42 decided to leave to take up their awards. Another eight were either considering moving or in the process of doing so earlier this month.
The ERC told RPN that it is too early to provide numbers for its 2023 grant rounds, as the winners of some funding calls have not yet been announced.
