Business planning

Design community receives boost from reduced registration fees

Designers and owners at design-led smaller UK businesses can expect more affordable protection for their work, with the government announcing plans to introduce cheaper rates for registering designs.

As part of a series of measures seeking to better meet the needs of British designers, the government?s reduced rate system ? effective as of 1 October 2016 ? aims to enable design-led businesses to make considerable savings, especially when producing and registering collections.

Set out in 2016?s registered design rules, the new fee structure will see the cost of?registering a single design via the government?s online system fall by ?10, to ?50.

For designers applying to register more than one design, the cost savings are set to be greater. Applying to register between two and ten designs will cost designers ?70 under the new system, with each extra chunk of ten designs costing ?20 on top of that.

The new system would therefore see an application to register 40 designs costing just ?130, whereas it previously would have cost ?1,620.

Renewing applications to register designs will also be made cheaper under the new system. For six to ten-year application renewals, designers will now pay ?70, a saving of ?50. Renewing for 20 to 25-years will now cost ?140, down from ?450.

Commenting on the new rules, minister for intellectual property and energy Lucy Neville-Rolfe said: ?Our designers will be able to take advantage of the new fees and creative design-led businesses will benefit from the significant savings available.?

The so-called ?design economy? added ?71.1bn to the UK economy in 2013, according to government statistics, with turnover in the design sector having grown by nearly 20 per cent since 2009, and design-led exports having increased by over 50 per cent.

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