My Lords, I am delighted today to be speaking under the guidance of my Minister here: after all, she has had experience of large companies and food companies, mine being a tiny one and hers being a very large one. She was a very senior civil servant when I first worked with her. She was working in No. 10 and we were trying to sort out how to write complaints systems for all sorts of other businesses. It is very nice to be talking with a Minister who knows what it is to be a Minister, to be a civil servant and to work in business. I feel that I will be very well led by her on this.
I have also had experience of large companies and trademarks. My own company was getting ready to put together a whole new range of foods. We had had our own experience of trademark registration: we had just started doing this registration when suddenly, one day, I got a telephone call from a very large company saying that it thought I had made a mistake, that I was attempting to put something through, that it had not gone through and that I should stand back, because this company had gone ahead and decided on its new product. It had got all the paperwork, packaging and everything done. I was very fortunate to be able to phone the civil servants who had been guiding me that far and who had told me that, once I had started to make this registration for what was then a trademark, I was safe and that I should tell them to go somewhere else. The answer was, “Oh dear, we have made a terrible mistake. We would like to give you lots of money to not go forward with what you are doing”. As it happened, we had not even started properly and were looking to build a new factory. The outcome was that the company paid us enough money to build it. I encourage any small company that gets threatened by anybody else to immediately assume that it is in the right and not, as most small companies do, automatically assume that it might have got it wrong.
I will move forward to other people who have spoken. My noble friend Lord Hodgson talked about unicorns—the larger, earlier-stage companies—and I was very interested in what he had to say. The Law Commission emphasises how vulnerable SMEs are,
and I am only too delighted to support this here today. I will not say much more, as there will be plenty of other times for us to do that as we go forward, but I will just say thank you very much indeed for bringing forward something which is going to be such a help to small and medium-sized businesses. Whether we vote to stay in or vote to stay out, our patents are our patents.
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