Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what was the cost in each of the five years leading up to the UK's departure from the EU of the UK’s participation in the Erasmus and Erasmus+ programmes.

While the UK was a member state of the EU, we did not make seperate contributions to individual EU programmes such as Erasmus+, but instead made an overall contribution to the EU budget which was then used to fund those programmes. It is therefore not possible to calculate a figure for the UK government’s direct contributions to Erasmus+.

However, an indicative UK contribution figure can be obtained by taking the total Erasmus+ payments made in each year and applying to it the UK’s funding share of the overall EU budget in that year.

Table 1 gives an indicative estimate of the UK’s Erasmus+ contributions between 2015 and 2019. The UK contributions estimate taken from table 1 in the attachment is included below.

Under Erasmus+, the UK already contributed significantly more than we got out in the form of receipts, and the only terms of offer for continued participation would have required an annual gross contribution of £600 million, or a net contribution in the region of £2 billion over the course of the programme.

The Turing Scheme goes further than Erasmus+ by being truly global. It also goes further in enabling more disadvantaged students to benefit from the opportunities of studying abroad, including by providing extra funding for disadvantaged students, and paying for extra costs for them, including travel costs.

Table 1: UK Indicative Erasmus+ contributions in millions of pounds