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Want a Brexit? Promise you'll sort out UK universities' £1bn research cash loss

Report authors call on gov.UK, business to up their spend

Leaving the EU could mean UK universities lose a whopping £1bn research funding, according to report released by Digital Science today.

Academics have already warned the UK that leaving the EU would hinder research. A letter to The Times was signed by more than 150 fellows from the Royal Society - including Stephen Hawking - which said that Brexit would be a “disaster for science”.

Digital Science, a technology company which provides software for scientific researchers, compiled the report.

Their data showed the UK was the fifth-largest producer of science and technical articles behind USA, China, Japan and Germany, despite receiving just 1.63 per cent from public and private sectors in research.

If funding from public bodies such as the European Research Council and European commission is slashed, the private sector would need to ramp up its spending on British universities to compensate, the report said.

But partnerships between businesses and research have so far been disappointing. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reveal that investment from UK companies contribute only 1.06 per cent of GDP toward research and development. This is below the average of many European countries and is almost 80 per cent lower than the R&D investment made by German businesses.

“Our success in gaining European funding is masking serious deficiencies not only in government commitment to R&D but also to the commitment of the wider business community”, the report said.

Should the UK vote to leave next month, the report stresses that “significant political efforts will need to be made to plug the funding gap and avoid long-term damage to the research and education sector”.

Not everybody agrees with this, however. Speaking at The Royal Society earlier this month, Viscount Ridley, member of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee and science journalist, said that the need to stay in the EU for funding was a “myth”.

Fifteen non-EU countries including Switzerland, Norway and Iceland still receive public funding. In fact, they are the top three countries that have the greatest funding per head of population from the biggest EU funding programme, Horizon, worth €79bn.

Ridley said that some of the biggest scientific organisations including The European Space Agency, The European Molecular Biology Organisation and CERN, were not EU-membership exclusive and was unfair if the EU parliament held the power to decide how money was spent.

“For me, in the end, it’s all about innovation. The European Union is bad at doing it, good at discouraging it, repeatedly sides with those who have vested interests in resisting it, and holds Britain back from achieving it.

“Where are the European digital giants to rival Apple and Amazon, Google, Facebook and Wikipedia?”, said Ridley.

The Digital Science report shows that only seven per cent of the EU’s research funding has been awarded to non-member states in the last decade. ®

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