Webinar report: Competition enforcement and the CMA – what in-house lawyers need to know

For most in-house legal teams, contact with the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) is rare. Knowledge of its work is generally acquired from news coverage or occasional interactions.

So, we teamed up with Tamara Todorovic and Louise Banér, both CMA Directors (and both former private practice lawyers), to explore the CMA’s role, remit and how businesses can engage with it effectively. Moderating the webinar was Charlotte White, Employment, Engagement & Equality Partner at RPC.

The remit to regulate

The CMA is the UK’s primary competition and consumer law enforcement agency. From its offices in Edinburgh, Belfast, Darlington, London and Manchester, the CMA fulfils a statutory duty to promote competition for the benefit of consumers. This includes:

• Understanding how markets work;
• Advising government and public bodies;
• Tackling cartels;
• Scrutinising mergers;
• Addressing unfair practices; and
• Investigating markets that may not be working as well as they should for consumers.

The CMA also works with sector-specific bodies such as Ofgem, Ofcom and the FCA to assess who’s best placed to investigate potential illegal conduct in regulated industries.

Illegal conduct defined

UK law prohibits organisations from entering into agreements or concerted practices that restrict competition. A concerted practice is an informal understanding that does not require a written agreement. In other words, any of form of collusion that replaces competition with coordination – including an informal verbal agreement – is illegal.

Cartels are considered to be among the most serious infringement of competition law and are illegal. A cartel exists where two or more competing businesses agree not to compete – for example by fixing prices, sharing customers or territories, or coordinating bids.

For example, cartel members avoid pursuing one another’s customers and agree which market sectors and/or regional territories each will take. Or where members do pitch for the same business, they agree between them how much each will bid to influence the outcome of the bidding process.

Exchanging competitively sensitive information is another form of anti-competitive activity. Again, this applies even if imparted over a casual chat.

Similarly, businesses using a position of market power to restrict competition could be cause for investigation by the CMA. An abuse of a dominant position is prohibited in the UK by Chapter II of the Competition Act 1998 and in Ireland by section 5 of the Competition Act 2002 (as amended). It mirrors EU law under Article 102 TFEU.

Consequences of infringement

Calculating the full cost of a breach of competition law is nigh on impossible. To start with, a business can be fined up to 10% of its annual turnover. Additional open-ended costs include:

• Director disqualification – up to 15 years;
• Debarment from public sector contracts for up to five years;
• Damages claims by victims, irrespective of whether the CMA has investigated the case;
• Reputational harm; and
• In the criminal cartel cases – prison – up to 5 years.

In recent years, the CMA has shown it is fully committed to taking strong enforcement action to tackle harmful anti-competitive conduct. In February 2025, the agency reached a settlement amounting to over £100 million with several global banks. Traders at the banks had been using private chat rooms to unlawfully exchange information about government bonds.

The following month, the CMA concluded its first labour markets case. This involved the sharing of information about fees paid by sports broadcast and production companies to freelancers. The aim was to coordinate – and therefore limit - pay rates. The guilty parties faced fines totalling £4.2 million.

Another recent case involved 10 car makers and two trade associations. These organisations coordinated on how they communicated their recyclability claims and colluded to avoid paying for the recycling of customers’ old cars. The fines totalled £77 million.

And in 2023 a CMA investigation into bid rigging in the demolition sector led to 10 businesses being fined a total of nearly £60 million and four directors being disqualified. Prices submitted created the illusion of competition and in some instances the ‘winning’ bidder compensated the ‘losers.’

Leniency

If you believe your organisation is involved in cartel activity, leniency may be available – if you contact the CMA quickly.

Provided you meet the conditions of leniency and cooperate with the CMA, you'll get protections. The strongest protections apply if a) you're the first person to apply for leniency, and b) if you do so before a CMA investigation has started.

In this scenario, you'll get guaranteed immunity from financial penalties, director disqualification, criminal prosecution and public sector contract exclusion.

In the first instance, call the CMA’s leniency line (020 3738 6833) for an initial conversation on a no-names basis. Be ready to provide some limited information about what you've uncovered.

The CMA will then assess whether full immunity is available and aim to get back to you generally within a few days. If full immunity is available, the conversation with the CMA will progress according to the status of your internal investigation and what further information you can provide.

Leniency could also be available if you contact the CMA after they’ve begun an investigation. However, this is not guaranteed, and protections are at a lower level: discounts on financial penalties, for example, are capped at a percentage rather than providing full immunity.

An open door for genuine collaborators

While committed to taking enforcement action against anti-competitive conduct, the CMA is keen to stress its role in enabling legitimate, pro-growth business collaboration.

The CMA is aware that assessing whether or not collaborations between businesses risk falling foul of competition law can be tricky and sometimes hears that fears about competition law might be standing in the way of collaborations which could bring benefits to society.

As part of its role as an enabler of competition it is inviting businesses or trade bodies to approach the CMA where uncertainty about the application of competition law may be holding back collaborations that could support, for example, innovation, investment, growth in the UK economy or sustainability goals.

The CMA is particularly interested to hear from stakeholders in the eight key industrial strategy sectors.

Businesses can contact the CMA where they:

• have conducted a competition law self-assessment of whether their proposed collaboration complies with competition law,
• still face genuine uncertainty about the application of competition law, and
• consider that the proposed collaboration would have a wider benefit, such as supporting investment, innovation or growth.

While it is not for the CMA to provide formal legal advice to individual businesses on specific arrangements, and the CMA is unlikely to be able to take action in every case, the CMA may be able to help if businesses are being put off collaborating in ways that may be good for consumers or the wider economy, because of uncertainty about how competition law applies.

For more advice on beneficial collaborations visit: Collaborating with other businesses - GOV.UK

Learn more

There’s more information about the CMA, including information on cartels with case studies, how to apply for leniency, how to report a competition problem to the CMA and a short guide on beneficial collaboration with other businesses at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-markets-authority. This also includes guidance on the CMA’s other functions such as about consumer law.