I am making it clear to the Committee that they fall—they have no effect—if there is a deal. The point of them is to deal with the unlikely eventuality of there being no deal—or if there is no exit.
We are looking for a deal. We hope there will be a deal, in which case our proceedings are irrelevant and the regulations will have no effect. If there is no deal, obviously we will need them.
If I may make a little progress, I will continue. I believe that we are recognised for our strong intellectual property regime. We were ranked third in the world by Taylor Wessing in 2016, and our enforcement regime was ranked first by the US Chamber of Commerce in 2017. UK businesses are reliant on IP rights—IP-intensive industries generated more than a quarter of UK employment and 43% of UK GDP in 2013. The IP framework is designed to provide a balance. It should reward creators of IP and encourage innovation, while balancing the needs of other businesses and consumers by managing the scope and duration of, and exceptions to, rights.
The intellectual property framework provides rights holders with some exclusive entitlements, such as the right to control distribution of a protected product. However, there are instances where this right is limited in order to promote the free flow of goods across borders.
The exhaustion of IP rights refers to the loss of the right to control the distribution and resale of the product once it has been placed on the market in the specific territory by or with the permission of the rights holder. The UK is currently part of a regional exhaustion regime which allows the movement of IP-protected goods across borders within the European Economic Area once they have been placed on the market by or with the permission of the rights holder anywhere within the European Economic Area. This regional regime enables a balance between allowing rights holders
to recoup the investment in innovation while facilitating the secondary market and free circulation of goods within this area.
The UK laws which currently provide for this regional exhaustion regime need to be amended to ensure that they continue to function appropriately after exit. The statutory instruments will ensure that there will be no change to the position on exhaustion rights in relation to the parallel importation of goods from the EEA to the UK. There may, however, be restrictions on what can be exported from the UK to the EEA on the same parallel basis, but that is a matter for the EU legal system and is not something we can control.