Senate approves supplementary education budget with 400 million euros in cuts

The Senate has approved the supplementary education budget by a large majority. Several parties that had voted against it in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch Parliament, voted in favor in the Senate on Tuesday. The budget includes more than 400 million euros in additional cuts.

While ChristenUnie, SGP, CDA, and JA21 opposed the budget in the Tweede Kamer, ChristenUnie’s Senator Hendrik-Jan Talsma explained his party’s support in the Senate, citing the government’s reversal of cuts to the educational opportunities scheme. GroenLinks–PvdA, D66, Volt, and the SP continued to oppose the budget.

The approved budget also contains a proposal from the Partij voor de Dieren, which calls for the gradual reallocation of funding from monkey experiments at the Biomedical Primate Research Center (BPRC) to animal-free research over the next five years. As a result, funding for such research will decrease in the coming years. Caretaker Minister for Education, Culture, and Science Gouke Moes has said he intends to find an alternative way to finance the experiments, though it remains unclear how he plans to do so.

Currently, the BPRC receives €12.5 million in annual subsidies, with around €2.2 million dedicated to alternatives to animal testing. The amendment calls for this funding to be gradually increased each year to help decrease the number of monkey experiments.

The Cabinet’s controversial education budget, with 1.2 billion euros in cuts to higher education and research, was approved earlier this year by a majority in the Eerste Kamer, the Dutch Senate.

The total education budget amounts to 57 billion euros. Initially, it included 2 billion euros in reductions, but this figure was lowered to 1.2 billion euros after debate in the Tweede Kamer. The country’s universities and research institutes were among the hardest hit by the austerity measures.