EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Baroness D'Souza Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness D'Souza (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I make no apology for returning to the Erasmus scheme. The Minister’s Answer earlier this week to a Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, was less than satisfactory. He advanced two main arguments justifying the UK’s departure from the scheme. The first was that continued full membership would cost more than the expected income from the programme. There have been almost twice as many European participants to the UK in 2019. This should be a cause for soft power celebration. The additional cost to the Treasury was estimated at £2 million. In the grand scheme of things, this is not an exorbitant sum for creating opportunities for young people at the beginning of their careers to exchange ideas across international borders and to forge long-term friendships; 53% of all those UK students abroad were funded by the Erasmus scheme. The dividends from this kind of co-operation outweigh the yearly cost of our membership. It has been estimated that the true profit from Erasmus is in the region of £243 million per annum.

The second argument put forward by the Government is that, unlike the proposed Turing scheme, Erasmus is not truly international. Well, the 2019 Erasmus programme reports almost 1 million participant students working with 111 organisations on 25,000 projects throughout Europe and with non-EU partners from around the world. The proposed Turning programme, apart from its name, is a poor substitute, and is what others have termed “a small-minded move”. It is another national mobility scheme and no equal to the multilateral, multifaceted, reciprocal Erasmus scheme, our departure from which will adversely affect universities and the taxpayer. It is to be hoped that the Government might reconsider its decision when the UK’s membership of the Erasmus programme comes to an end later this year.