The government announced on 4 November a package of reforms to the UK designs system, including new Intellectual Property Office powers to examine registered designs and a proposed small claims route for design disputes.
The government said the changes are intended to make protection and enforcement simpler for the country’s 80,000 design businesses. It said it will introduce legislation, when parliamentary time allows, for those measures that require it.
The announcement is the government’s formal response to a consultation led by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) that closed in November 2025 and received 90 responses.
The government said lone designers and microbusinesses are estimated to make up 92% of design businesses, and that the current system has long been criticised as overly complex for them.
On anti-competitive filings, the government said it intends to legislate to give the IPO powers to consider whether a design is genuinely new before registration. The IPO will also be able to consider whether an application has “individual character”, meaning whether it creates a clearly different overall impression from anything already made public.
The government described a pattern in which registrations are used to send takedown notices to online marketplaces. It said affected businesses reported spending between £10,000 and more than £50,000 to resolve those cases.
It will only consider legislating to let the IPO refuse bad-faith applications. Before doing so, it said, it will carry out further work to define bad faith in practice and identify the evidence needed to prove it.
On enforcement, registered design cases must currently go through the Patents Court or the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) multi-track. The government said it will take steps to allow them to be heard in the IPEC Small Claims Track for the first time.
That track handles lower-value disputes with compensation claims capped at £10,000, and currently covers copyright, trade mark and unregistered design cases. The government said the change “would” make access to justice easier and more affordable, and that in the coming months it will work with designers, legal professionals and business groups on how it should be taken forward.
A new 30-month deferment period will bring the UK into line with the EU and the international Hague systems. Designers will be able to apply early and delay making a design public for up to 30 months.
The law will be updated to make clear that a design including animation, movement or transitions can qualify for registered protection, and the IPO will add file format options so animated designs can be filed as moving image files.
The IPO published a Designs Practice Notice in April 2026 on how applications for graphical user interfaces and animated designs are examined.
The rules on unregistered design protection will be simplified, aligning what qualifies and how long protection lasts. Supplementary unregistered design protection will apply when a design is disclosed anywhere in the world, which the government said removes a post-Brexit disadvantage.
Registration procedure changes include a single report for multiple objections, standardised response deadlines and new registrar powers to correct errors on the register.
The government is ruling out criminal offences for unregistered design infringement. It said there is insufficient robust evidence that they would be a balanced, proportionate and effective remedy. The Intellectual Property Act 2014 already provides for criminal sanctions against anyone who intentionally copies a registered design without the owner’s consent.
On computer-generated designs, the existing legal framework will stay in place while the government monitors AI use in the design industry.
Simon Wright, president of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, said the institute welcomed the “measured proposals for reform” and was “particularly pleased to see that many of our recommendations have been taken on board”.
John Coldham, chair of the Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys Designs & Copyright Working Group and head of IP at Gowling WLG, said retention of both UK design right and supplementary unregistered design, with plans to harmonise qualification, “will come as a huge relief to designers”.
Kevin Scott, president of the IP Federation, said the federation welcomed confirmation that criminal sanctions for unregistered design infringement will not be introduced.
Minister responsible for intellectual property Chris McDonald said the reforms will mean designers “spend less time bogged down in admin”. The government’s full consultation response is published on GOV.UK.