Britain is rejoining a Europewide student exchange program that it abandoned to the disappointment of many young Europeans in the fractious aftermath of Brexit.
The British government said on Wednesday that it would pay approximately 570 million pounds, or about $760 million, to take part in the program in 2027, adding that longer-term financing remained to be negotiated.
The exchange program, called Erasmus, began in 1987 and allows young people to study or train for a year at colleges across Europe while paying the same fees they would at home. As well as offering students the chance to live in a foreign country, with all the personal and language development that entails, it also had broader impacts — including, according to a European Commission study, a million babies born to participants who met their partners while on the program.
But in the years after Britons voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, the program became a casualty of the increasingly fraught relations between London and Brussels. In 2020, Boris Johnson, a Brexit supporter and then the Conservative prime minister, pulled Britain out of Erasmus and set up a different exchange program not restricted to Europe.
On Wednesday, the Labour government said it was reversing that decision, a sign of progress in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to reset relations with Brussels, which has proved more difficult in other areas.
Last month, negotiations over British participation in a European military-funding program called SAFE collapsed amid a dispute about how much London would have to pay to take part.
That was seen by some analysts as a blow to efforts to improve military and security cooperation between Britain and the European Union following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Nick Thomas-Symonds, the British minister responsible for relations with the European Union, described the Erasmus agreement as “a huge win for our young people, breaking down barriers and widening horizons to ensure everyone, from every background, has the opportunity to study and train abroad.”
A joint statement from Mr. Thomas-Symonds and Maros Sefcovic, the European Union’s trade commissioner, said the financial terms represented “a fair balance between the U.K.’s contributions and the benefits the program offers.”
The £570 million contribution is significantly more than Britain paid to take part before Brexit, however. From 2015 to 2019, it paid between £200 million and £300 million each year. In 2021, the Conservative government said that would have risen to £600 million a year had it remained in the program post-Brexit. The government said on Wednesday that it had negotiated a 30 percent discount compared to the default terms offered to countries outside the European Union.
Negotiations had been complicated because the global importance of the English language is a big draw for continental Europeans to study in Britain. Over the years, that usually created in imbalance in numbers taking part in the program, with fewer British students going in the other direction.
But the British government said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people in Britain could benefit from the program in the first year and that studying abroad could improve the career prospects of participants, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Under Mr. Starmer, the British government has been trying to work more closely with the European Union. Opinion polls show that a majority of Britons now view Brexit as more of a failure than a success.
London and Brussels have yet to finalize a different plan to open up a limited number of work visas to young Europeans in exchange for reciprocal rights.
Progress was made in other areas, however, with the two sides also announcing on Wednesday that they had agreed to start negotiations on electricity market integration and had set a deadline to agree separate deals for the trade of food and drink across the English Channel and for linking carbon markets.
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
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