Lords find strong EU support among science community

CaSE has responded to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s report on EU membership and UK science, published today. The report finds overwhelming enthusiasm for EU membership amongst the science community.

Commenting on the report, CaSE Director Dr Sarah Main said:

“The science community has been shown again to be a big supporter of EU membership. Like CaSE, the Lords Committee found overwhelming enthusiasm for membership of the EU. Scientists report experiencing tangible benefits to their work from EU membership, such as access to funding, collaboration and access to large scale facilities.

This report’s nuanced evidence makes clear the strong, if not unanimous, enthusiasm for EU membership amongst the science community. But the role of EU membership in UK science is also important for the wider UK public. Nearly a fifth of all EU money received by the UK is spent on R&D, so it represents a large slice of the cake. And multi-national scientific endeavours will be central to tackling the major challenges facing our society now, and in the generations to come.

As the public seek out facts to help make up their minds in the run up to June 23rd, this report is a helpful contribution to the much wider debate on the UK’s membership of the EU.”

At the end of last year CaSE published its own report on the role of EU membership in UK science and engineering research, containing evidence and insight gained from our data analysis and interactions with the community.