Horizon Europe

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I assure the noble Lord that the delays are not coming from our side. The TCA was ratified. It required pieces of EU programmes legislation to be in force, which is why we did not join Horizon Europe instantly when we signed the TCA last December. Iceland, Norway and Ukraine have all joined the programme recently but there is no such committee yet in existence and this Government continue to apply pressure to the EU Commissioner about this.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that, as so many of the issues and opportunities we face are global in nature, we need to look to all our international partners and friends across Europe and the Commonwealth and right around the world for research connections and collaborations? International research collaboration is the brightest, best and most transformative piece of soft power.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his—as usual—to the point question. The Government are committed to making the UK a global science and research superpower. We are a partner for choice for many world-leading and rapidly growing R&I nations. Through our interactions with other Governments, we know that there is significant and growing demand from world leaders such as the US and Japan to commit more funding to collaborative research. I could point my noble friend and the House to various examples, including the £12 million UK-Japanese LongOps project to help faster and safer decommissioning at Fukushima; the £20 million UK-US collaboration on the Thwaites Glacier; and the New Variant Assessment Platform, which is undertaking Covid-19 genomic sequencing at Porton Down for the whole world.