A new dawn? The United Kingdom’s new competition law regime for vertical agreements

On 1 June 2022, competition law practitioners in the UK were placed in the unenviable position of having to assimilate two new regimes for the treatment of vertical agreements under, respectively, European Union and UK competition law. Despite the long lead-up, which in the case of the EU reforms had lasted since October 2018, practitioners had less than a month to assimilate the final text of both the new EU Vertical Agreements Block Exemption Regulation and the UK’s Vertical Agreements Block Exemption Order before they entered into force. Indeed, the Competition and Markets Authority’s Guidance on the new UK regime was only available six weeks after the new Order came into effect. Despite the new UK regime being promoted as being based on ‘bespoke rules better suited to the UK’, the reality is that its final form reflects a carefully balanced review by the CMA that prioritized close alignment with the EU over divergence for its own sake. Although there are some notable differences between the two regimes, which are reviewed in this article, the overall outcome is one of dynamic alignment with an EU regime that provided the original model for modern UK competition law and looks likely to have a dominant influence on its development for the foreseeable future, despite Brexit.