The United Kingdom's ‘enhanced concurrency regime’

Abstract

An interesting feature of the Competition Act 1998 (the ‘CA 1998’) is the concurrency regime: the UK's sectoral regulators are given concurrent powers with the Competition and Markets Authority (‘CMA’) to enforce the Chapter I and Chapter II prohibitions and Articles 101 and 102 TFEU. This article explores the ‘enhanced concurrency regime’ that has applied since the entry into force of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 and considers the main points outlined in the CMA's 2018 Concurrency Report and competition enforcement activity by the CMA and sectoral regulators in regulated sectors. It concludes with some thoughts on how concurrency may function in a post-Brexit world.