Competition and Consumer Protection Law Establishing priorities for reform
In April 2018, the Government published the "Modernising Consumer Markets" Green Paper, which set out its ambition to ensure that modern consumer markets work for all and included a number of proposals aimed at safeguarding consumer rights, particularly in view of new technology and new business models, whilst strengthening competition.
	In August 2018, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy asked Lord Tyrie, then Chairman of the CMA, to make proposals on legislative and institutional reforms to safeguard the interests of consumers and to maintain and improve public confidence in markets. Lord Tyrie’s response, published in February 2019, indicated that there was scope for strengthening and updating the UK’s competition and consumer law framework, particularly in light of the economic and technological developments of recent years.12 Lord Tyrie presented a series of proposals intended to focus the work of the CMA more directly on protecting the interests of the consumer, enabling the CMA to intervene earlier and more robustly to tackle consumer detriment and to penalise and deter wrongdoing when it occurs. Lord Tyrie also recommended a suite of measures to make the CMA’s work generally more agile and efficient, including a reconsideration of all aspects of the competition regime, complemented by a statutory duty of expedition.
	In February 2020, the Government commissioned the CMA to produce a regular state of competition report to raise the collective understanding of the level of, and the trends in, competition across the UK economy.13 The CMA published their first report in November 2020, concluding that competition may have weakened over the previous two decades.14 Their report called for regulators and government to remain vigilant in protecting and promoting competition, especially as the UK prepared to emerge from the severe economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The CMA published their second state of competition report in April 2022, finding that market concentration remained higher than it was before the financial crisis of 2008, average markups had been increasing, and the biggest firms had been able to maintain their leading positions for longer.15