Competition regime: CMA priorities and draft secondary legislation

The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 (ERRA13) will create a single Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to succeed the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission, and give it strengthened powers to promote competition and therefore growth. We are now consulting on a ministerial statement of strategic priorities for the CMA and secondary legislation which clarifies how the competition regime will work in future.

This consultation seeks views on the draft text of the steer and the following key pieces of secondary legislation:

• maximum penalties for failure to comply with the CMA’s information gathering powers
• legal rules to determine when an enterprise is to be treated as controlled by a person and the turnover of an enterprise for the administrative penalty for failure to comply with merger interim measures
• modification of the scheme dealing with public interest concerns in ‘European relevant merger situations’
• timing of merger fee payments

This document forms the first of 2 sets of consultations on draft statutory instruments. It runs in parallel with a consultation by the CMA Transition Team on some of the new CMA guidance, which explains the reforms to the legal framework and how the CMA will use its powers in practice. You may find it useful to consider both consultations together: Competition and Markets Authority guidance: part 1.

The 2 consultations will be followed by a second BIS consultation document that will provide further draft statutory instruments and a second consultation on the CMA’s guidance. These will be published in mid-September 2013.