The UK government published its response to the standard-essential patents consultation on 13 October 2026, and the headline is what it declined to build. According to the GOV.UK announcement, the government will not introduce the standalone Rate Determination Track at the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court that the 2025 consultation floated, and will not set up an IPO-run essentiality checking service — the evidence, it says, did not make a clear case for either at this stage. The consultation ran from 15 July to 7 October 2025 and drew 93 responses from businesses, representative bodies, legal and academic experts; GOV.UK records broad support for the aims but sharply differing views on the scale of the problem and on whether government should intervene at all.
What the government will do instead is a package of procedural and informational measures. It intends to work with the judiciary to explore a court-anchored early FRAND determination process inside existing England and Wales proceedings — not confined to the IPEC — and to develop FRAND licensing guidelines explaining how parties should use that pathway. The Intellectual Property Office will run a call for evidence on the feasibility and design of a voluntary, IPO-led FRAND opinion service that would give parties an early, non-binding view on whether a proposed licence offer sits inside a FRAND range; GOV.UK is explicit that no final decision has been taken, that the work starts shortly and that the call for evidence will be published on GOV.UK when it launches. Alongside that: a voluntary route for rightsholders to lodge standard-related patent information at the IPO, work on pre-action information exchange and clearer signposting to existing ADR, practical good-faith negotiation guidance aimed particularly at businesses with little SEP experience, non-binding best-practice principles for essentiality assessment and reporting, and an expansion of the SEP Resource Hub the IPO launched in July 2024. IPO chief executive Adam Williams framed the measures as removing friction from an ecosystem that now reaches well beyond mobile connectivity into advanced manufacturing and medical technology.
The quietest paragraph is the most consequential. The government says it considered stakeholder concerns about injunctions and the threat of them during licensing negotiations, concluded that the consultation did not show the current framework systematically blocking market entry, deterring innovation or driving products off the UK market, and therefore will not act to limit the availability of injunctions in SEP disputes at this time. Writing in IPWatchdog, Jeremy Smith and Michael Charlton of Mathys & Squire read the response as leaving the existing SEP licensing framework intact without adding meaningful regulatory burden — a result they see as favourable to patent owners. They also point out that although the guidance measures are pitched at smaller businesses, nothing in the package addresses the litigation-cost asymmetry an SME licensee faces when negotiating opposite a large portfolio holder.
What it changes
If you were waiting for a cheap number, stop waiting. Any implementer who had deferred signing a licence on the expectation that a low-cost IPEC track would soon produce a determined rate has lost that option. The route to a UK FRAND rate remains full infringement and FRAND proceedings in the High Court — the forum that, since the UK Supreme Court confirmed its jurisdiction to set global rates in the Unwired Planet line of cases, carries global consequences. That is a very different cost and risk profile from a bounded rate hearing, and it needs to be re-priced into any negotiation currently running on the assumption of a forthcoming shortcut.
Injunction leverage is unchanged, so the clock is the real deadline. There is no statutory brake coming on UK injunctions, which means the strongest lever in a SEP negotiation — the prospect of a connected product being pulled from a major market — stays exactly where it was. Practically, an implementer should treat the first approach letter as the opening of a litigation timetable rather than a commercial conversation, and keep a dated, auditable record of every counter-offer, information request and response. UK FRAND outcomes have repeatedly turned on which side behaved as a willing licensee, and the government’s new emphasis on pre-action information exchange will only sharpen that assessment.
Early FRAND determination front-loads the evidence. If a FRAND determination becomes available at the start of proceedings rather than at trial, then comparable licences, royalty-base analysis, portfolio strength and essentiality all have to be ready on day one. That converts portfolio work from a litigation deliverable into a pre-dispute one. Both sides of a SEP negotiation should know, before the first meeting, which families in a declared portfolio actually drive the rate — which is a portfolio analysis exercise, not a drafting one.
Essentiality remains your burden to carry. With no official checking service, nobody is going to hand you a verdict on whether a patent declared essential really reads on the standard. The government’s answer is better information and voluntary best-practice principles, not adjudication. For an implementer facing several thousand declarations, the economically rational step is still a sampled claim-chart review of the small number of families that move the price, paired with validity analysis against the ones that survive — the same work that underpins a patent invalidation challenge. For a holder, the mirror risk is new: once you volunteer standard-related patent information to the IPO, any gap between what you declare there and what you actually assert becomes material someone will put to you. Reconcile the two lists before you file either.
Write offer letters as if they will be graded. A FRAND opinion service, if it survives the call for evidence, would turn licence offers into documents a third party assesses for reasonableness early in a dispute. The cheapest way to prepare is to stop sending bare rate demands and start stating the rate, the base, the comparables relied on and the reasoning, contemporaneously, in every offer and counter-offer. That record costs nothing to build now and is impossible to reconstruct later.
The wider picture is that the administrative shortcuts are closing. The European Commission’s 2024 SEP transparency regulation, with its mandatory register and essentiality checks, was shelved in the European Parliament the following year, as IPWatchdog notes; the UK has now declined its own register-and-rate equivalent. What remains is courts — England and Wales, the UPC, and the Chinese forums that have attracted anti-suit activity — and private negotiation conducted in their shadow. The practical deadline to diarise is the IPO’s call for evidence on the FRAND opinion service, which GOV.UK says will appear there shortly and is the one point in this package where an outside party can still change the design.