Tech and AI
The intellectual property brief moves to the science minister, and the Copyright Tribunal moves with it
By Staff Writer | 22 August 2026
The Intellectual Property Office confirmed on 21 August that Chris McDonald MP has taken responsibility for intellectual property. He is Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Investment, appointed on 21 July in the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and on 23 July jointly in the Department of Health and Social Care. His published list of public bodies puts the Intellectual Property Office and the Copyright Tribunal alongside quantum, engineering biology and the research councils.
Ministerial appointment notices are short and are usually read by nobody outside the department concerned. This one is worth two minutes because of where the brief has landed rather than who has it.
What the same minister now answers for
The published responsibilities for the office are research and development, science, research and innovation, life sciences, tech investment, scale-ups, access to finance, the Office for Investment, international tech, engineering biology, quantum, the Government Office for Technology Transfer and the Government Office for Science. The public bodies listed under it include the research and innovation funder, the innovation agency, the advanced research agency, the National Physical Laboratory, the British Business Bank, the Intellectual Property Office and the Copyright Tribunal.
Putting the patent office and the copyright tribunal in the same portfolio as the research funders and the investment brief is a choice about how intellectual property is being framed. It sits with the machinery that pays for invention and tries to commercialise it, rather than with the machinery that regulates culture.
IP is central to the UK's creative and innovative strengths, helping people and businesses protect ideas, attract investment, and bring new products, services and content to market.
Adam Williams, Chief Executive, Intellectual Property Office
The two dates, and the new department
The minister's own page gives two appointment dates and they are not the same. He was appointed Minister of State jointly in the Department of Health and Social Care on 23 July 2026 and in the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade on 21 July 2026. The second of those departments is described in the announcement as newly formed. Before all of this he was Minister for Industry across the energy security department and the business department between 11 September 2025 and 21 July 2026, and he was elected as the member for Stockton North in July 2024.
The career before politics is unusual enough to note. He read chemical engineering at Cambridge, took an MBA at Warwick, spent twenty years in the steel industry with a focus on research, became a laboratory manager in a steelmaker's research division in 2008, and in 2014 led the divestment of the Materials Processing Institute from that business and became its chief executive. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Why a construction or engineering business should care
Two things follow, and both are about where a dispute ends up rather than about policy. The first is that the Copyright Tribunal now sits under a minister whose other responsibilities are research funding and investment, which is the part of government most exposed to arguments about what may lawfully be used to train a model. The second is that the same office grants and administers patents, and a business whose value sits in a process, a fabrication method or a piece of design software has its registry and its licensing forum under one political owner for the first time in this arrangement.
Neither record says what the minister intends to do. No consultation is named, no timetable is given, and no position is stated on any live question. What has changed is the ownership of the brief, and that is all that should be read into it today.