The legal regime of competition in United Kingdom

• Author: Ovidiu-Horia Maican
• Pages: 113-119

The legal regime of competition in United Kingdom

Lecturer Ovidiu-Horia MAICAN1

Abstract

The United Kingdom ha s recently introduced a unitary comp etition regime.

Begining with 1979, the United Kingd om was a primary exp onent of the neoliberal

philosophy, putting in first place market, privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation. For

that reason, a competition p olicy did not exist too much in practice for almost two decades.

An important aspect was the influence of European Un ion competition law. Even in a such

situation, the supranational policy could not take the place in of a domestic competition

policy. The British Parliament ado pted some rules in 1998 in the field of anti-competitive

agreements and the control of abuse of dominance and in 2002 in the field of merger

control. In March 2012, there were announced the proposals for the reformatio n the United

Kingdom competition law regime. According to the proposals, the functions of the

Competition Commission and the competition functions of the Office of Fair Trading

(OFT), will be the competences of a new, single competition authority, the Competition and

Markets Authority (CMA). The new body will have jurisdiction to analyse merger control

reviews and market investigations, and in the same time will act as the main institution

enforcing the competition laws.

Keywords: United Kingdom, competition, reform, authorities.

JEL Classification: K21, K33

1. Introduction

The main components of the UK competition regime are market studies

and market investigations (examining markets which do not work well for

consumers, with powers to impose remedies where an adverse effect on

competition is found), merger control (maintaining competitive pressures in

markets by prohibiting anti-competitive mergers between businesses or otherwise

remedying their potential adverse effects on competition), anti-trust (enforcing

legal prohibitions against anti -competitive business agreements, including cartels

and the abuse of a dominant market position) and competition advocacy

(promoting the benefits of competition and challenging barriers to competition,

such as those which might result from existing or planned Government

regulations).2

1 Ovidiu-Horia Maican - Bucharest University of Econo mic Sudies, Law Department,

ovidiuszm@yahoo.com.

2 Parker, J., Ares, E., Barclay, C., Conway, L., Edmonds, T, Kelly L, S eely House of Commons

Library Research Paper 12/33, 2012, p. 17.