The government has set out a package of reforms to the UK’s designs system, aimed at making protection and enforcement simpler for the country’s 80,000 design businesses. The announcement, made by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) on 4 November 2026, is the formal response to a consultation that closed in November 2025.
Why it matters for small studios
The UK design sector contributed close to £137 billion to the economy in 2023 and supports more than 2 million jobs, according to the IPO. But an estimated 92% of design businesses are lone designers or microbusinesses, and the IPO says the current system places a disproportionate burden on them.
A key problem identified is anti-competitive filing. Some people register designs they did not create, copy a rival’s product images or marketing materials, or file for generic products they had no hand in making. These bogus registrations are then used to send takedown notices to online marketplaces, pulling legitimate businesses into disputes. The IPO says affected businesses have reported spending between £10,000 and more than £50,000 to resolve such cases, a sum likely to be prohibitive for many independent designers.
What the reforms actually change
The government intends to introduce legislation giving the IPO new powers to assess whether a design is genuinely new before it is registered. Examiners would be able to consider whether an application has “individual character”, meaning it must create a clearly different overall impression from anything already made public, rather than being only a trivial variation on an existing product.
Ministers are also considering further legislation to give the IPO explicit powers to refuse bad-faith applications. Before that happens, the IPO says it will do more work to define bad faith in practice and work out what evidence would be needed to prove it, so no immediate deadline applies to that strand.
Beyond tackling abuse of the system, the package promises a simpler and more affordable route to court for smaller design businesses that believe their work has been copied, alongside more consistent registration processes and clearer rules covering both registered and unregistered protection. The IPO also says it will modernise protection for designs involving animation, with new filing options for moving image files, an area it says current rules do not adequately cover.
What to watch next
The measures are described by the IPO as the foundations for a system “fit for purpose” for decades ahead, but much of the detail, including the legislative timetable for the new examination powers and the definition of bad faith, has yet to be worked out. UK design businesses, particularly sole traders and small studios who make up the bulk of the sector, should watch for the draft legislation and further IPO guidance on how the new individual-character test and bad-faith provisions will be applied in practice, as these will determine how quickly the promised protections become enforceable.