Dawn O’Porter

Before the EU referendum, there had been for some time quite a stable relationship between the UK and the rest of the European Union for research funding, for collaboration with people, for exchange of people and researchers, and for regulation of science and innovation.

So I tend to think of it as those three main areas, like people, funding, regulation.

And that had been developed over a number of decades.

And what had developed was a framework, if you like, that made multilateral collaboration between countries in the European Union as seamless as possible.

So that if you were a UK researcher and you wanted to collaborate,

do a big collaboration across Europe on, let's say, a rare disease or some kind of research into the future of aerospace or something like that.

It was quite straightforward to bring together universities and businesses across a number of countries.

And all the sort of legal and financial and practical paperwork, if you like, was in place.

And the UK was a really active member of that European community.

And it was quite a sought after partner.

In the area of satellite technology, there were two different major programmes.

One was called Galileo.

And the UK was part of this consortium with the European Union to develop Europe's own equivalent of the GPS satellite system.

And the UK had invested and given a lot of the science and research towards the equipment on the satellites.

But once we had decided to leave the EU, the UK was no longer able to be part of that system.

And we're still not.

And it's because of reasons of security.

So that's something that is a really...

clear change that we were going to be part of this GPS system and we're now not.

There was another Earth observation system called Copernicus, which we were able to negotiate to still be part of.