Lord David Currie (CMA): Realising the benefits of the new UK regime

Institutional For the benefit of the readers of Concurrences could you outline the main features of the UK competition regime, and the effect of the recent reforms? The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) passed by the UK Parliament brought together our two predecessor organisations, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Competition Commission (CC), under a reformed, enhanced UK competition regime from 1 April 2014. We are an independent non-ministerial government department with responsibility for carrying out investigations into mergers and markets, enforcing competition and consumer law, and handling appeals relating to sector regulators’ decisions. The straightforward statutory objective Parliament set out for us is ’to promote competition, both within and outside of