The UK Competition Authority publishes guidance on forms of cooperation considered as temporarily permissible during the COVID-19 outbreak

Competition/antitrust laws generally require rival firms to operate on the market independently of each other and tolerate cooperation between competitors only in limited circumstances where any resulting loss of competition is clearly offset by consumer benefits. But as businesses scramble to deal with the unprecedented fall-out from the COVID-19 outbreak, governments and competition authorities have been confronted with demands for these laws to be relaxed or even suspended, in order to help companies, and the economy more generally, weather the storm. UK competition legislation allows the government to exclude business arrangements from the normal strictures prohibiting anti-competitive agreements for exceptional and compelling reasons of public policy. Making use of this provision,