ANALYSIS: UK PHOTONICS
Analysis and opinion section sponsored by
The UK, Europe and the Horizon
Despite Brexit uncertainties having affected its participation in photonics consortia, the UK is committed to collaboration in Horizon Europe for the long term, writes John Lincoln
W
hen the Brexit deal was finally signed on 24 December, the
accompanying declarations confirmed the news we had long waited for: ‘the United Kingdom shall participate as an associated country in all parts of the Horizon Europe programme’. The Joint Declaration
on Participation in Union Programmes was not confined to Horizon Europe, but covers a host of other vital EU programmes including: Euratom and Fusion energy, the European Space programme and Copernicus, European Research Infrastructure and more. Exceptions, such as the European Innovation Council fund are few and far between.
8 Electro Optics March 2021
Throughout the whole Brexit
process, the mutual benefits of participation in European- wide collaborative research and development have been one of the few areas all parties have agreed on. However, nothing was guaranteed until the wider deal was signed, and for four years uncertainty over the UK’s position has been eroding UK participation in consortia and bodies like Photonics21. In 2015 there were ten UK members of the Photonics21 board of stakeholders, there are now just two.
While the EU-UK treaty and
declarations finally remove the uncertainty, we cannot simply turn the clock back to 2016; the
world has also moved on. The previous virtuous chains, where being in one consortia led to being invited into the next have, in many cases, been broken. Past and potential partners have not sat in Calais waiting, they have found alternative collaborators who, in what is already a high stakes application process, are perceived to tip the odds just a little in their favour. We can’t expect our European friends, or even UK partners, to read and instantly absorb treaty text. Having been coasting, engine idling, for four years, it is time to restart the motor, sensitive to how the whole field has upgraded and even the course has changed. The world continues to change
“Our European friends are as happy as the UK photonics community that we will be part of Horizon Europe”
and the innovation ecosystem continues to evolve. The impact of Covid-19 on our ability to meet and form the bonds of trust that are vital to building effective collaborations is clear. However, even before the pandemic, the longer-term trends toward digitisation, carbon neutrality and deglobalisation were already clear and now even more significant. While the UK may have left the European Union, our industry strategies are perhaps
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