The UKIPO has in the past decade or so taken to amending the Rules (ie the secondary legislation, which does not need parliamentary time) and the forms and the fees to go with them on an ad-hoc basis with ever-increasing frequency (sometimes it feels as if the Office has nothing better to do on rainy Friday afternoons except re-arrange their forms!) Consequently, whenever advising any client of any point, the only safe way is first always to re-check the entirety of the UKIPO trade marks website --which, if the website is down, is impossible to do, and hence even now in the 21st century one has to have to hand one’s Rules and Practice Statements in hard copy and kept up to date daily. Even daily is not sometimes fool-proof [who can forget the day when the UKIPO changed on a Friday afternoon the opposition deadline from two months to two months less one day and implemented the change immediately on posting it on their website? Even if you had done a whole sweep of the site less than an hour before, you would still not be totally up to date.

In contrast, design rules change very infrequently, because I am told by Allan James, back at a public meeting in 2007, that there is something about how the design laws are devolved from parliament which means that the UKIPO can change them only once a year, on 1 April. Wouldn’t it be better if the Office could do the same for trade marks? Not to have ad-hoc changes - sometimes with no warning let alone adequate warning - but instead to make all changes for the year ahead all on the same day? But just not April Fools Day? This would engender certainty for everyone. If designs are important enough for there to be restrictions on the power devolved to the UKIPO to change design rules, why are trade marks considered less important such that there are fewer restrictions on the Office for them?