The United Kingdom is an extremely favorable jurisdication for filing patents, for a several reasons:

General benefits of filing national phase applications in the UK:

Price – official fee for filing a national phase patent application in the UK is 230 GBP together with a search and examination request. There are no varying fees for different entities and no secret additions to this fee.

Speed – Normally, within 4 months, a search and examination report will be issued, and examination will begin. This is much faster than the examination in most of the other jurisdictions.

Quality – The quality of the search and examination are usually excellent, and are much better than, for example, seach and examination conducted in the US. Such search and examination can be very good indication of the quality of an application.

Friendly PTO – The UK IPO is extremely user friendly. It is very easy to ring to a British examiner, they are always happy to conduct telephone or in-person interviews, and are very keen to help. The help-desk is also efficient and helpful. The website is very good and applications can be filed on-line via the website or with a smart card and an official filing receipt with a serial number are received immediately.