The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a review of 10 years of the current concurrency arrangements, which set out how the CMA and sector regulators collaborate to enforce competition law and promote competition in these eight regulated sectors.
The sector regulators with concurrent competition law powers include the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA); the Office of Communications (Ofcom); the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA); the Northern Ireland Authority for Utility Regulation (NIAUR); the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority (Ofgem); the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR); the Office of Rail and Road (ORR); and the Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat).
In 2014, reforms were introduced to enhance the concurrency arrangements and strengthen cooperation between the CMA and sector regulators on their shared competition powers. A decade on, the CMA said the review is an opportunity to assess the impact of concurrency on the work of the regulators and competition in the UK.
The CMA is calling for views and feedback on the impact and effectiveness of the concurrency arrangements from as diverse a range of perspectives as possible. It added it wants to hear views on how the arrangements have helped the effectiveness of sector regulators, their impact on the effectiveness of the UK’s competition regime and any improvements which could be made to the arrangements.
Participants are invited to submit a response to the CMA’s call for input, with the CMA expecting to report the findings of the review on the Concurrency Review case page in Spring 2024.