In terms of EU R&D budgets, the UK is a net receiver by 63%. It contributes 5.410^9€, and receives 8.810^9€, says the Royal Society [0].

To find a stick to beat a dog in the EU budget is easy.

After looking closely at UK financial contributions to the EU, the conclusion of a London School of Economics study[1] summarises things quite more eloquently: "In assessing the UK contributions to the EU’s finances, there are interpretations which are reasonable and those which are ‘spun’ to make political points, even though they are – bluntly – an abuse of statistics. A normative judgement about whether what the UK’s contributes (however measured) to the EU budget could be better spent on other public projects or whether the ‘membership fee’ yields sufficient benefits to be justified is beyond the scope of this paper. But the evidence is clear that, although it is a net contributor to an extent comparable with several other Member States of a similar level of prosperity, the UK does not face an unfair share of the burden of the gross costs of paying for Europe."

[0] https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/projects/eu-uk-fundi... (page 12)

[1] https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67030/1/Begg_EU%20budget.pdf

Analyses of only the R&D budget is surely a biased interpretation of the statistics. To spell it out: If XYZ nation contributes 100bn and receives 10bn back to spend on R&D (because it has loads of high skilled workers / industry perhaps) and 20bn back to spend on everything else - that still makes it a net contributor to the tune of 70bn.

The EU is saving the UK money in many ways. All the costs of standardisation, trade negotiation, etc alone, of Britain needed to do all the processes itself, get the cost difference back. One of the first things UK did after the article 50 notice was to hire 4000 people for trade stuff that it didn't need to manage before - similar in many other fields. Medicines approval, aviation safety, maritime observation, Galileo, border protection, student exchanges, research, climate action, food standards and safety, development aid, election observation missions, ... All this is done through the EU budget.

Of course not the same amount of £££ flows to and fro, but anyone who thinks that should be the case really should start reading on what the EU actually does.

Exactly, you can understand the misguided reasoning that leads to Brexit.