The UK’s re-entry to the EU’s Copernicus programme, the world’s most ambitious earth observation system, is in doubt as the two sides haggle over London’s financial contribution.
The UK government has indicated that it will not stump up its full £750mn contribution initially earmarked for the project’s 2021-27 budget of €5.4bn, after having been shut out for the past two years.
Along with Copernicus, which operates low earth orbit satellites to provide environment and security monitoring, the UK was excluded from the EU’s flagship Horizon scientific research programme and the Euratom nuclear programme in 2021 because of its dispute with the bloc over post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland.
That issue was resolved in February when London and Brussels signed the Windsor framework, which improved the functioning of trading arrangements in the region and removed a key irritant in UK-EU relations.
But the two sides agreed that the UK must rejoin Horizon, Copernicus and Euratom or face exclusion from all of them as part of the wider post-Brexit settlement with the EU in 2020.
After it was shut out, the UK lost out on key Copernicus contracts and last November diverted £200mn of the £750mn to other space budgets. Some £80mn was used to fund national Earth observation projects, while £120mn went towards an increase in its contribution to the European Space Agency, which is independent of the EU.
“We still see value in being part of Copernicus, but time has passed,” one UK official said. “We have already spent some of the money because we were not getting access. The UK is looking for a discussion that takes into account the fact that we have been locked out [of Copernicus] for two years.”
The UK’s position has been reinforced by divisions in the UK’s space industry over the merits of rejoining Copernicus after such a long period of exclusion.
One camp wants the Copernicus funds reallocated to a national space budget, which has been promised for many years but has never materialised.
“The lack of industry involvement over the past few years means it is very difficult to see . . . how [UK industry] would get value from the investment [in Copernicus],” said Stuart Martin, head of the Satellite Applications Catapult, a space industry accelerator.
On the other side, some of the larger companies in the British space industry, such as Airbus, favour rejoining the programme, especially as a lucrative tender for the next generation of satellites is coming up later this year.
If the UK has not rejoined by then, its space industry will be excluded from bidding for the contracts. Research organisations are also understood to be in favour of rejoining, according to one space industry executive.
The FT reported last month that the UK wants its annual contributions to the Horizon research programme reduced because late entry has diminished its value to UK academics. Prior to its exclusion, it had been expected to fund about €15bn of the €95.5bn budget between 2021 and 2027.
The EU is open to reducing the UK’s contributions for Horizon but not for Copernicus, whose seven-year budget to 2027 is €5.4bn, or the smaller Euratom programme, which has a five-year budget to 2025 of €1.4bn.
One EU diplomat said: “The payment rules are different for Horizon and the other programmes. For Horizon, a discount is acceptable but for the others, not so.”
The UK government said it would not provide a “running commentary” on talks. The European Commission declined to comment.
