Work programme

The work programme is the authoritative document. When a portal page and the work programme disagree, the work programme wins. It is the legal act the Commission adopted, and the evaluators are instructed from it. Everything else, the portal fiche included, is a rendering of it.

It contains the topics for a two-year period, each with budget, expected outcomes, scope and conditions. It also contains the GENERAL ANNEXES: the standard rules on admissibility, eligibility, evaluation criteria, scoring, thresholds and financial arrangements that apply to every topic unless that topic explicitly overrides them. Most of what an applicant needs to know only once lives there.

It is long (several hundred pages per cluster) and almost nobody reads it end to end. The efficient approach is to read the general annexes once, properly, and then read only the pages covering your topic. That is perhaps four pages, and they are the four pages your evaluation will be scored against.

Work programmes are amended during their life. Budgets shift, deadlines move, topics are occasionally withdrawn. The amendment is published as a new version of the same document, so a proposal built on a version downloaded eight months earlier can be built against conditions that no longer apply. Check the version before submission, not before writing.

Draft work programmes circulate months before adoption, and they are genuinely useful for planning. A topic's direction rarely changes fundamentally between draft and final. They are not, however, quotable: budgets and deadlines in a draft move regularly, and building a partnership around a draft topic that is later dropped is a known way to waste a year.