United Kingdom Competition Law

United Kingdom competition law is affected by both British and European elements. The Competition Act 1998 and the Enterprise Act 2002 are the most important statutes for cases with a purely national dimension. However if the effect of a business' conduct would reach across borders, the European Union has competence to deal with the problems, and exclusively EU law would apply. Even so, the section 59 of the Competition Act 1998 provides that UK rules are to be applied in line with European jurisprudence. Like all competition law, that in the UK has three main tasks.

• prohibiting agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business entities. This includes in particular the repression of cartels.
• banning abusive behaviour by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position. Practices controlled in this way may include predatory pricing, tying, price gouging, refusal to deal and many others.
• supervising the mergers and acquisitions of large corporations, including some joint ventures. Transactions that are considered to threaten the competitive process can be prohibited altogether, or approved subject to "remedies" such as an obligation to divest part of the merged business or to offer licences or access to facilities to enable other businesses to continue competing.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Competition Commission are the two primary regulatory bodies for competition law enforcement. The OFT's slogan is that it "makes markets work well for consumers". Consumer welfare is usually thought of as the dominant objective of competition law, though it may connect with a number of difficult questions relating to industrial policy, regional development, protection of the environment and the running of public services. Competition law is closely connected with law on deregulation of access to markets, state aids and subsidies, the privatisation of state owned assets and the establishment of independent sector regulators. Specific "watchdog" agencies such as Ofgem, Ofcom and Ofwat are charged with seeing how the operation of those specific markets work. The OFT and the Competition Commission's work is generally confined to the rest.