Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether he has had recent discussions with representatives from the EU to understand whether the simultaneous disclosure of unregistered designs in the UK and EU would provide protection for those designs in the UK and EU.

The UK sought an agreement with the EU on reciprocal disclosure for unregistered designs. This would have been beneficial to UK design businesses. However, the

EU decided to pass up the opportunity to conclude such mutually beneficial text, which is disappointing. There are no plans to revisit this issue with our EU partners.

However, the Government recognises that this an important issue for UK designers and will consider it in our future work on the UK designs system.