Working Groups cease work

After many years, the Registry Practice Working Group (RPWG), which had inherited the mantle of the Designs Practice Working Group (DWPG), has now been dissolved. This wasn't at the users' request - these were, in my personal experience, very useful groups.
It was announced at the last (in both senses) meeting of RPWG in June. "Higher level" issues will now be discussed in a new forum called the Trade Marks and Designs Policy Forum. This will deal with policy (as the name implies) and also "significant legal and practice changes". However, "minor issues relating to registry operations and practice will be dealt with elsewhere" - apparently in an online forum.
What is one to make of this? UK trade mark and, particularly, design filings are much more by unrepresented applicants - domestic SMEs and individuals - than in the past, as large companies and foreign applicants have used the European or International routes. I suppose, therefore, that there is perceived to be rather less need to meet representatives. On the other hand, there is no one else to represent the unrepresented.
Perhaps the Registry has merely tired of discussing "minor", or what I'd call bread-and-butter, issues in person. I am generally a fan of electronic forum use. They enable wider consultations. However, I don't think they substitute for human contact. The RPWG and DPWG meetings were a two way street, and what we will miss is not what the Registry gets from us - we can say anything we need electronically - but the chance to recieve information and, more importantly, the feeling that we have been heard, and perhaps understood. I may have got this all wrong, but this move is close enough in time to the IPO's "IP Complaints" fiasco for it to feel like the Registry is trying to disengage from the professions - and if that is right, I suspect that, in the long term, both sides (and therefore, in the long run, applicants and the public) will lose out.

UK Designs - Priority Practice Change

The UK IPO announced at the most recent RPWG meeting that it is considering changing its practice to permit filing a declaration that the design is identical to a claimed priority filing, so as to avoid the need to file a certified priority document. Sounds sensible enough, but are substantive and procedural differences worldwide so great that a similar form would have a dissimilar effect and vice versa? And is it right that third parties should be unable to look at the priority document?
Comments welcomed, either here or to me.