First, I would like to put on record my support for this Bill. I fully understand the huge opportunities it presents for UK plc. I do not agree with those who believe this is a Bill to strip away rights and hard-fought-for gains in various legislation. Those who detract seem to forget that, when the UK was part of the EU, often, legislative change was led by this country to improve rights for all people in the EU, and it is because of this country’s input that many of these pieces of legislation are in place today in the EU. On that basis, there is no reason why we cannot enhance some of these laws further. This Bill will give us as a nation every opportunity to do so.
However, I would like to ask the Minister to ensure that, when changes are made, we take every opportunity to enhance laws beyond what we currently see. As well as doing that, can we ensure we have a swift mechanism so that when we do not get it right—in some instances we will not get it right—we can swiftly plug any loopholes? Today, I want to briefly highlight one sector that is being exploited not by the Europeans, but by far eastern countries as a result of us being too liberal—with good intention, I might add—from the outset after Brexit.
Currently, a member of the Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys who is EU qualified but does not currently reside in the EU, cannot practise on EU trade marks in the EU, or in this country for that matter. When Brexit happened, the only criteria we adopted to represent a client here in the UK was the need to have a UK address—so the criteria are different from those under which we traditionally operated. The change, while it had every intention of making the system more open, actually has brought huge unintended consequences, with tens of thousands of additional applications clogging up the system. We see far eastern companies and others setting up a PO box in this country, which counts as having a UK address. On the face of it, that does not seem to be an issue, until of course you need to contact them, which you cannot.
Prior to Brexit, if a trade mark was breached in this country, a company would employ a trade mark attorney, who then would negotiate with the company or the attorney of the company breaching the trade mark or trying to apply for a similar trade mark. An agreement generally would be reached before having to go to court and the cost to UK business was more of an irritant than a substantial cost. Now we have a multitude of PO boxes where a company’s attorney cannot even get a reply by email from those so-called companies. That means it has to go to court on virtually every occasion. That is many times more costly for UK companies, not to mention the huge amounts of frustration and irritation that comes with the current process.
To highlight how huge this issue is, these foreign-based firms with PO boxes now account for 39% of all UK trade mark applications at the UK Intellectual Property Office, compared with just 19% prior to Brexit in 2019. If we are not careful, we will have a situation where trade mark-intensive industries, which by the way account for £770 billion of our GDP each year, may be completely undermined by what appears on paper to be a good change of legislation, but which in reality has the ability to totally undermine the sector and a huge part of our GDP.
Without taking any more of the House’s time, I would like to ask the Minister to reiterate what safeguards will be in place to ensure unintended consequences, such as those happening to the trade mark and intellectual property sector, do not happen. What can the Minister do to ensure we have a system in place where legislation can be changed quickly, as in the case of CITMA, when we totally miss the unintended consequences?