Patent Office (Hansard, 13 February 1991)

§ Mr. Leigh

It is important that the financial framework for the Patent Office enables it to provide a high-quality service as economically as possible. However, at present there is no clear relationship between the level of resources allocated to the Patent Office and customer demand. In order to provide such a relationship the Patent Office will move to a net running cost regime from 1 April. While this provides a close link between customer demand and current resources, restrictions will remain, for example, on transferring funds between financial years. Additional flexibilities, which the Patent Office believes would enable it to improve the service provided to customers, would be available to a trading fund established under the Government Trading Act 1990. As announced in the trade and industry expenditure plan report (Cm. 1504) published this week, I hope that the Patent Office will achieve trading fund status later in the 1991–92 financial year. The Patent Office is today opening a consultation process on this proposal, seeking comments by 12 April. I have placed a copy of this letter in the Library.

As part of the process of approving the 1991–92 Patent Office corporate plan a review has been conducted of he performance of the Patent Office against the targets for t he period 1990–91 to 1994–95 announced by the then Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley), on 1 March 1990, at column 295. These were three efficiency targets covering annual average improvements in patent search and trade mark productivity and a relative reduction in the size of common services over the five years, together with an annual quality of service measure for patent searches, and a quality of service measure for the five years taken together for trade mark examination. These targets continue to be testing ones for the Patent Office and I do not propose to alter them. I regret, however, that the review has identified an arithmetic error in the calculation of the overall average productivity improvement which results from these targets. The figure should have been 2.5 per cent. a year rather than 4 per cent.