Government plans to let small claims track hear registered design disputes

The government says it will take steps to let registered design cases be heard in the small claims track of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) for the first time, a route aimed at independent designers and small studios, under reforms announced on Wednesday 4 November.

At present, registered design cases have to go through the Patents Court or the IPEC multi-track. The small claims track already hears lower-value copyright, trade mark and unregistered design cases, with compensation claims capped at £10,000. The government says it will spend the coming months working with designers, lawyers and business groups on how to make the change.

The package is the formal response to a consultation run by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), which closed in November 2025 and drew 90 responses. Changes that need new law will be legislated for when parliamentary time allows.

Checks before a design is registered

The government intends to legislate to give the IPO powers to examine whether a design is genuinely new before registering it, and whether it has individual character, meaning it gives a clearly different overall impression from anything already made public.

The aim is to stop people registering designs they did not create, copying a competitor's product images or marketing material, or filing generic products, and then using those registrations to send takedown notices to online marketplaces. Businesses caught up in such cases told the government they had spent between £10,000 and more than £50,000 resolving them. A separate power to refuse bad-faith applications is being considered, but only after further work on how bad faith would be defined and proved.

Other changes

• Deferment: designers will be able to apply early and keep a design unpublished for up to 30 months, in line with the EU and the international Hague system.
• Animation: the law will make clear that designs including movement or transitions can be registered, and the IPO will accept moving image files, which matters for digital product, UX and motion graphics work.
• Unregistered protection: the rules on what qualifies and how long protection lasts will be aligned, and supplementary unregistered design protection will apply wherever in the world a design is first disclosed, so a UK designer launching at an overseas trade show or online gets the same cover as one launching in the UK.
• Paperwork: objections will come in a single report, response deadlines will be standardised and the registrar will be able to correct errors on the register.

The government has ruled out making infringement of an unregistered design a criminal offence, saying there was not enough firm evidence that it would be proportionate or effective. Copying a registered design on purpose without the owner's consent can already be prosecuted under the Intellectual Property Act 2014. The existing rules on computer-generated designs stay in place while the government monitors AI use in the industry.

The IPO puts the number of UK design businesses at 80,000. Figures from the Design Council cited in the announcement show the design economy contributed £136.7 billion in gross value added in 2023, 5.5% of the UK total, and employed more than 2.27 million people in 2025. In 2020, 92% of design businesses were micro-businesses.