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LONDON — Britain and the EU are set to announce a post-Brexit agreement on rejoining the bloc’s flagship Horizon science funding project within days.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been considering a draft deal on the scheme — which Britain has been shut out of since Brexit — over the summer.
Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Sunak has now told officials to finalize an agreement. Two well-placed U.K. government officials confirmed that report to POLITICO Wednesday. The first said a deal should be announced in the “coming days.” An EU spokesperson said it appeared talks were “moving very quickly in the right direction.”
Britain left the EU’s science funding system when it formally quit the bloc in January 2020. Talks on re-associating with Horizon as a third country then stalled amid a bitter row over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland. Discussions resumed in earnest in March, after London and Brussels struck the Windsor Framework deal on Northern Ireland.
But the U.K. government has been pressing for a bigger discount on its association fees, arguing that British science lost out significantly in the two years its researchers were frozen out of the multibillion pound scheme.
No. 10 Downing Street believes they’ve secured a major win on compensation for the two years in which British researchers were frozen out, the first of the two U.K. officials cited above said, arguing this will mark a personal boost to Sunak, who has sought to repair frayed relations with the EU and vowed to make Britain a science and technology “superpower.”
A Horizon deal would also follow the Sunak model of damping down all speculation on an EU agreement, before producing the final product with a flourish, as was the case with the Windsor Framework.
Speaking in the House of Commons at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Sunak said his government’s “priority and preference is to associate to Horizon,” but said he wanted to do so “on terms that are right both for the British taxpayer and for British science and research.”
A spokesperson for the U.K.’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Graham Lanktree contributed reporting.
