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New measures that will strengthen and streamline the UK’s new competition regime have been outlined by the Competition Minister Jo Swinson

The proposals published in a consultation, Competition Regime: Draft Secondary Legislation – Part 2 include:

Competition Minister Jo Swinson said:

Alex Chisholm, Chief Executive Designate of the CMA, said:

The proposed measures are part of a number of changes being made to the way competition cases are dealt with in the UK ahead of the CMA’s launch in April 2014. The changes include:

Today, the CMA Transition team is also publishing a second set of guidance documents for consultation.

The additional 6 guidance documents for consultation cover: the CMA’s approach to consumer protection; the CMA’s Competition Act investigation procedures and Competition Act rules of procedure; prosecution guidance for the criminal cartel offence; the concurrent application of competition law to regulated industries; the variation and termination of merger, monopoly and markets undertakings and orders; and the CMA’s proposed approach to the treatment of existing Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Competition Commission (CC) Guidance.

The new authority will be the UK’s single leading body responsible for promoting competition for the benefit of consumers across the economy. It will provide essential services to business and consumers, operating with flexibility and with a more streamlined approach to decision making. Bringing together the CC and key consumer functions from the OFT, the CMA will be a powerful advocate of competition both in the UK and globally.

The consultations close on 11 November 2013.

Notes to Editors:

1.The CMA will be legally established on 1 October 2013 and become fully operational on 1 April 2014. The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which creates the CMA received Royal Assent on 25 April 2013. The new unified Authority will bring together the Competition Commission (CC) with the competition and certain consumer functions of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and will be responsible for advocating competition for the benefit of consumers. The CMA will bring about significant benefits to business and consumers, including greater coherence, flexibility, speed and transparency in the operation of the competition regime.

2.The government recognises and values the close relationship between competition problems and consumer activities. The CMA will therefore have the OFT and CC’s full competition toolkit as well as consumer protection enforcement powers. It will have the power to tackle practices and market conditions that make it difficult for consumers to exercise choice in an otherwise competitive market.

The secondary legislation from BIS

3.The BIS Statutory Instruments released today can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/competition-regime-draft-secondary-legislation-part-2

4.The deadline for submitting responses in relation to the BIS consultation is 11 November 2013. Anyone who wishes to comment can email competition.consultation@bis.gsi.gov.uk or write to:

Paul Griffiths, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 3rd Floor, Orchard 2, 1 Victoria Street, London, SW1H 0ET.

5.The second set of draft CMA guidance documents released today can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/competition-and-markets-authority-guidance-part-2

The deadline for submitting responses in relation to the CMA consultation is 11 November 2013. Anyone who wishes to comment can email.

CMA transition team guidance:

6.The CMA guidance consultation sets out how the CMA will work in practice, and how it will interact with businesses and individuals across the range of its powers and responsibilities. Views on the consultation documents are welcomed from businesses, their legal and other advisers, and other interested parties.

7.The introductory document, Towards the CMA, and the first five guidance documents - Mergers: guidance on the CMA’s jurisdiction and procedures; Market studies and market investigations: supplemental guidance on the CMA’s approach; Administrative penalties: statement of policy on the CMA’s approach; Cost recovery in telecoms price control references: guidance on the CMA’s approach and Transparency and disclosure: statement of the CMA’s policy and approach were published for consultation on 15 July 2013 and the consultation closed on 6 September.

8.The current consultation covers the following areas:

9.The Transition Team, which has been convened by the CMA Chair Designate and Chief Executive Designate, consists of individuals from the OFT, the CC and elsewhere. Pending formal creation of the CMA on 1 October 2013, the OFT and CC act on behalf of the CMA through the Transition Team.

10.The creation of the CMA will reduce inefficiency, duplication and overlap in our markets and mergers regimes and ensure that we have a single authority with the right powers and flexibility to use the best processes in tackling competition problems. The CMA will build on the best of the OFT and CC to become a world-leading competition authority, advocating competition both at home and abroad. It will have a greater role in ensuring competition in regulated sectors is being addressed, as co-operation and information sharing between itself and sectoral regulators will be enhanced. Resource allocation will be improved, and business will benefit from having just one streamlined organisation to deal with.

11.The government’s economic policy objective is to achieve ‘strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared across the country and between industries’. It set 4 ambitions in the ‘Plan for Growth’, published at Budget 2011:

Work is underway across government to achieve these ambitions, including progress on more than 250 measures as part of the Growth Review. Developing an Industrial Strategy gives new impetus to this work by providing businesses, investors and the public with more clarity about the long-term direction in which the government wants the economy to travel.