Draft Patents (European Patent with Unitary Effect and Unified Patent Court) Order 2016

Debate between Ronnie Campbell and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 1st March 2016 General Committees

[Mr Vaizey]

I am extremely grateful for the chance to respond to the hon. Gentleman’s points. Let me deal first with the geographical basis of the unified patent court and the costs of the court and of patents. It is important to stress that the court will have a single jurisdiction and a single set of rules of procedure, but it will be spread across different locations.

There will be a court of first instance and a court of appeal. The court of first instance will have a central division, and there will be a number of local and regional divisions that have been set up partly at the request of individual member states. The central division will be located in Paris—the French won that fight. There will be also specialised central divisions, so although Paris will have the headquarters, Munich will have the specialised mechanical engineering part of the central division, and I am really pleased to say that London will get the bit of the central division specialising in chemistry and life sciences. That is particularly relevant to pharmaceuticals, in which, of course, the UK has a strong record. There will also be local divisions that one can visit to register a patent—one in London, four in Germany—in Munich, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Mannheim—and one in Stockholm for the Nordic and Baltic region, covering Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The court of appeal for the unified patent court will be in Luxembourg.

Court fees will be a combination of fixed fees and fees based on the value of a case, so they are likely to range from as little as €100 up to €300,000, but a €300,000 case would be one in which at least €50 million was at stake. Fees will actually be much lower in the unified patent court for small and micro entities than they have previously been. There will also be options for mediation and arbitration.

There are approximately 350,000 patents in force in the UK alone, which goes to show the level of work that the unified patent court will potentially be undertaking. The cost of a patent is also important. It will cost less than €5,000 to renew a patent for the first 10 years. The cumulative cost of maintaining a patent over its full 20-year term will be about €35,000. That compares with a cost at the moment of potentially about €160,000 to have a full patent in the 26 different jurisdictions in which the unified patent court would apply. The renewal fee scale adopted for the unified patent court corresponds to a reduction of about 78% compared with the cost of maintaining protection in 26 states.

Judges will be appointed from across Europe, and they will be experts in patent law. We expect to start the recruitment process soon. Whether the court sits as a single judge or a panel of judges will depend on the case.

I have something that Brexit Ministers cannot see—a brief about the impact of the referendum. It says absolutely nothing, really, so I do not know what people are getting so worked up about. The briefing seems to me to be completely meaningless, so let me busk it. I do not want to get into trouble with the Mayor of London or anyone else, but if we left Europe as a result of the referendum, I suspect it would be a decision for the UK Government whether they wanted to rejoin the European patent court. Of course, we would have to rely on our European partners to decide whether the UK could be a member.

[Mr Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley) (Lab)]

They will.

[Mr Vaizey]

I hear from the Opposition Benches that the deal has already been done, but I will leave it up to hon. Members to decide on the validity of that remark.