Professor Kurt Deketelaere © LERU
LERU: Balancing cost and simplification
One of the key issues of debate during Horizon 2020 negotiations has been that on the reimbursement of direct and indirect costs. Many of the arguments focused on balancing the demand for a full cost reimbursement for non-profit Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs), whilst achieving new targets for simplification in Horizon 2020, a key criticism of FP7.
Following intense negotiations in the trialogue between the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, the Horizon 2020 agreement will now see a more flexible interpretation of direct costs that will be reimbursed at 100% for both new research projects and closer-to-market activities. The EU institutions have also agreed a flat rate of 25% for the reimbursement of indirect costs.
Professor Kurt Deketelaere is the secretary general of the League of European Research Universities (LERU), a body representing 21 leading research universities in Europe. Speaking to Horizon2020projects.com, he provided his views on the agreement regarding costs as well as the continued importance of cohesion funding.
What are your thoughts on the deal on the reimbursement of direct and indirect costs under Horizon 2020?
I must say that the issue of the reimbursement rates within Horizon 2020 has known a difficult development, but has ended well. Keeping simplification was a very important goal and if you have multiple rules for funding for multiple players for multiple projects, this could have completely endangered the simplification goals of the framework programme. Many of these projects will involve work between universities and RTOs, SMEs and industry, so obviously it complicates enormously your whole way of working if each player in a consortium is subject to different funding and reporting rules. Because of these reasons, I was disappointed that these discussions took so much time, and at the end even became a personal battle instead of a matter of content.
If we look at what has now been approved: 100% refund of direct costs; 25% refund of indirect costs; VAT being a recoverable cost for those who cannot receive a refund under national legislation; and a commitment from the Commission to develop a set of rules to requalify a number of indirect costs to direct costs, which will lead to a refund of things which, instead of being indirect costs paid at 25% of the total of direct costs, will now be refunded for 100%.
A full cost system with a cap of 70% is never going to give you what you would get in a combination of those four elements which I just have mentioned, and so it was really strange for us in LERU to see a number of other very important organisations keep pushing for a full cost reimbursement, although knowing that this would endanger the whole simplification agenda.
What is the expected level of participation by LERU members in Horizon 2020?
I would like to say how enthusiastic LERU members are regarding the outcome and the satisfaction after two years of hard work with different expert groups on the varying elements of the framework programme. I think we are all very much prepared to enter the first calls which will hopefully come at the end of the year, and I feel there is a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of eagerness to become involved.
When the Commission was doing a call for the experts for the working groups, seemingly 16,000 people applied. If I look at the reaction that we had from our members, we saw a lot of people wanting to become involved and I see absolutely no reason why we would reduce the participation in the framework programme, on the contrary.
Cohesion funding
In many EU member states, the funding for research and innovation has decreased so it’s clear that the budget for Horizon 2020 will be necessary and universities will be in high competition with each other.
However, we must not also forget the €60bn-€70bn of cohesion funding which will be available for European regions in the field of research and innovation. Whilst in Horizon 2020 the distribution of the research funding is based on excellence, this is not the case for cohesion funding. A number of specific regions in several member states can apply for significant amounts of regional funding so it’s clear we will also try to influence and to stimulate participation of our universities to access this money, preferably in partnership with other organisations.
Within LERU, we are developing a policy that is aiming to combine, probably for the first time, a combination of Horizon 2020 money with cohesion money for the same project. This, along with university twinning and ERA Chairs, is something that we very much support and we are already trying to apply in daily practice.
As secretary general of LERU, I am also professor of law at the University of Leuven and am currently involved in developing new collaboration on climate change research with the University of Malta, an expert in this field. We have been talking to the Maltese Government to include this topic in the smart specialisation strategy that they need to draft for cohesion policy applications in the field of research and innovation. We have also been asking the Commission to consider climate change as a top priority in their regional policy planning for Malta and if both sides can agree on this, then we hope that we can get a significant amount of cohesion money into that new centre of excellence that the two universities are building, which will be very beneficial.
Both cohesion funding and Horizon 2020 funding will be important over the next seven years.
Professor Dr Kurt Deketelaere
