Announced by the Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) on 4th November 2026, the reforms follow a consultation launched in autumn 2025 which received submissions from the UK Fashion & Textile Association (UKFT) and the British Fashion Council as well as the broader IP and designer fashion and textile community.
The reforms are intended to address longstanding concerns that the existing system is overly complicated and disproportionately difficult for independent designers, sole traders and smaller businesses to navigate, especially where the work of small creative businesses is copied by larger and substantially better resourced businesses.
Tackling the misuse of design registrations
UK IPO will be given new powers to examine design applications before registration. The Government intends to introduce targeted searches and examination powers, allowing the IPO to consider whether a design is genuinely new and has individual character. The latter requires a design to create a sufficiently different overall impression from designs already made available to the public.
The Government will also consider introducing clearer powers to refuse applications made in bad faith, although further work is required to establish how bad faith should be defined and evidenced.
Easier and less expensive access to justice
The Government has said it intends to improve access to the courts for smaller businesses and independent designers. The Government aims to enable registered design disputes to be heard through the IPEC Small Claims Track. This offers a simpler and less expensive route for lower-value disputes, with compensation claims capped at £10,000.
This is an important development for independent designers and smaller fashion labels which may have limited resources to pursue infringement claims and is intended to address the issues where smaller companies’ IP is infringed by larger brands or retailers. A key issue here will be to see whether the reforms protect smaller UK companies where the infringer is based outside the UK.
Longer confidentiality period before publication
There will be a statutory 30-month deferment period to allow designers to apply for registered design protection while delaying publication of their designs for up to 30 months to develop products, organise manufacturing, prepare marketing campaigns and arrange commercial launches without immediately revealing designs to competitors. This will align the UK more closely with those arrangements already available through the EUIPO and the international Hague System.
Better protection for digital and animated designs
The UK intends to modernise the treatment of digital designs, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and animated designs so that designs incorporating movement, animation or transitions can qualify for registered design protection. The IPO will also explore the introduction of additional filing formats, including video files, to allow designers to represent movement more accurately in their applications. Three-dimensional file formats are also being considered as part of the IPO's digital transformation programme.
These changes will be relevant not only to digital product designers but also to fashion businesses developing digital products, virtual environments, interactive applications and other forms of digital presentation.
Changes to unregistered design protection
The Government intends to simplify the qualification requirements and rules governing the duration of unregistered protection. It will also change the law so that supplementary unregistered design protection can arise following disclosure anywhere in the world. This is particularly significant for British fashion and textile designers exhibiting at international trade shows or launching collections overseas. Under the existing arrangements, the geographical location of first disclosure can affect whether supplementary unregistered design protection arises in the UK. The proposed change would remove this disadvantage.
Disappointingly, the Government has decided not to introduce criminal offences for infringement of unregistered designs, concluding that there is insufficient evidence to justify such a measure.
How do the proposed UK protections compare with those available through the EUIPO?
The EU has already undertaken a substantial reform of its design protection framework. The new European Union Design Regulation (EUDR), Regulation (EU) 2024/2822, began taking effect in May 2025, with the full modernised framework becoming operational on 1 July 2026.
There are some important similarities between the two systems, but also significant differences.
1. Registered design protection
Both systems provide registered protection for designs which meet the requirements of novelty and individual character.
An EU registered design provides protection throughout the EU, initially for five years and renewable in five-year periods up to a maximum of 25 years.
The UK system similarly provides registered protection for an initial five-year period, renewable up to a maximum of 25 years.
An important difference is that the UK is proposing to introduce targeted searches and examination of applications to identify designs which are not genuinely new or lack individual character. The EUIPO, by contrast, principally examines applications against formal registration requirements, leaving substantive challenges concerning novelty and individual character to invalidity proceedings.
The proposed UK approach could therefore offer an additional safeguard against the registration of designs which should not qualify for protection.
2. Unregistered design protection
Both jurisdictions provide automatic protection for qualifying designs without requiring registration.
In the EU, an unregistered EU design provides protection for three years from the date on which the design is first made available to the public within the EU.
The UK has a more complex system, retaining both UK unregistered design right and supplementary unregistered design. This provides a different and, in certain respects, broader range of protection, particularly for product shapes, configurations and surface decoration. The proposed UK changes are intended to simplify these arrangements while retaining their breadth.
The EU's unregistered design protection requires disclosure within the EU in circumstances where relevant specialist circles operating within the Union could reasonably have become aware of the design. The proposed UK changes would allow supplementary unregistered design protection to arise following disclosure anywhere in the world.
This is potentially a significant advantage for British designers showing collections in Paris, Milan, Tokyo or other international fashion centres.
3. Confidentiality and deferment
The UK will introduce a 30-month deferment period, bringing it into line with the EUIPO, which already allows applicants to delay publication of registered EU designs for up to 30 months.
This is particularly useful for fashion and accessories businesses which need to secure protection ahead of a commercial launch.
4. Digital and animated designs
The EU has already modernised its definition of a design to include animation and progressive changes in design features. Its revised framework also recognises non-physical products, including graphical user interfaces and digital designs.
The UK proposals will bring its framework closer to the EU approach by explicitly recognising animation and transitions and exploring additional digital filing formats.
5. Enforcement
There is an important difference in the proposed approach to enforcement.
The UK is seeking to make registered design disputes more accessible to smaller businesses through the IPEC Small Claims Track, where compensation claims are limited to £10,000.
The EUIPO is principally responsible for the registration and administration of EU-wide design rights. Infringement disputes are generally dealt with through the national courts designated as EU Design Courts.
The proposed UK small claims arrangements would therefore offer a specific domestic route for smaller businesses seeking to enforce their rights.
What does this mean for UK fashion and textile businesses?
The reforms are a welcome recognition that design protection needs to work for businesses of all sizes, rather than simply those with the resources to register and defend extensive intellectual property portfolios. This is an issue UKFT and other creative industries have been campaigning on for many years.
For fashion and textile businesses, the proposed changes to supplementary unregistered design protection are particularly important. Fashion and textile collections are frequently unveiled at international trade shows, press presentations and showroom events, often before products reach the retail market. Allowing protection to arise following disclosure anywhere in the world should remove an important uncertainty for British designers operating internationally.
The proposed improvements to registration and enforcement should also help smaller labels challenge inappropriate registrations and pursue copying claims without necessarily incurring substantial legal costs although it remains to be seen how easy it will be to obtain a judgement through the courts, especially against overseas infringers.
Importantly, the UK and EU remain separate design protection territories following Brexit. A UK registration does not provide EU-wide protection, nor does an EUIPO registration automatically protect a design in the UK. Businesses selling and exhibiting in both markets should continue to consider protection in each jurisdiction.
Actions to prevent AI platforms from copying designs
Neither the new UK reforms nor the EU's revised design legislation has introduced a specific new right to prevent AI companies from copying designers' work or using it to train generative AI systems. The Government has decided not to change the existing law at this stage. Instead, it will monitor the use of AI in the design industry and consult with industry stakeholders and international partners.
Existing UK registered design law and UK unregistered design right already contain provisions which can attribute ownership of a computer-generated design to the person who made the necessary arrangements for its creation, where there is no human designer. Print designers should be especially careful when allowing others to manipulate their designs in production.
The EU has gone further than the UK in addressing the use of designers' work to train AI systems. Under Article 4 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (2019/790), commercial text and data mining is permitted under certain conditions, unless the copyright owner has expressly reserved their rights. This means designers and copyright owners can reserve their rights to prevent their protected work being used for commercial AI training without authorisation. For material made publicly available online, the reservation must be expressed in an appropriate machine-readable form.
The EUIPO has published guidance explaining how copyright owners can reserve their rights, including through website metadata and machine-readable notices embedded in digital files.
Article 53 of the EU AI Act requires providers of general-purpose AI models to have a policy to comply with EU copyright law, including respecting copyright owners' opt-out reservations and publish a sufficiently detailed summary of the content used to train their AI models. This is important because it introduces transparency obligations and makes it easier for copyright owners to understand what material may have been used to train AI systems although overseas infringement can be difficult to pursue.
The EU framework provides designers with a mechanism to reserve copyright in their work against commercial text and data mining. Details are available below. The UK currently has no equivalent general mechanism.
For UK fashion and textile designers and brands, this raises practical questions about the use of:
- Original fashion illustrations and garment sketches.
- Textile designs, prints and patterns.
- Photographs of collections and products.
- Digital files supplied to manufacturers, retailers and online platforms.
Conclusions
The Government's announcement represents an important step towards modernising the UK's design protection framework. The practical benefits will depend on the detail of the legislation, its implementation and the extent to which the proposed changes make enforcement genuinely more accessible to smaller businesses. This is especially important where a small company’s IP may be infringed by a larger company, or a companies based overseas.
UKFT will continue to lobby for increased protection from copying by AI platforms wherever they be based.
Further reading
- UK IPO – Government response to the consultation on changes to the UK designs framework, 4 November 2026.
- EUIPO – Copyright and Generative AI: how to reserve your rights.
- EU AI Act – Article 53.
- UK Government – Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, March 2026.
