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The UK’s competition regulator is likely to scrutinise fewer global deals as the government pushes it to adopt a more pro-growth agenda, the head of the agency said.
Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority, said that “a handful of global deals” may now proceed without CMA interference, while stressing that it would not be “open season” for mergers that harm consumers.
“I think at the margins there will be perhaps a handful of global deals that we would have looked at previously that perhaps we decide we don’t need to look at,” she said on Thursday at a London antitrust conference hosted by the Economist.
However, Cardell cautioned that this “is not an invitation, open season for every single anti-competitive merger under the sun. If we see a wave of those coming through then I think that our reviews will go up.”
The agency has already said it will cut timelines on some merger consultations in a bid to speed up the process for business, after ministers urged it to be “more agile”.
The government said in its draft “strategic steer” for the agency this month that the CMA should seek to avoid duplication where other regulatory bodies are looking at deals that will also address UK concerns.
The CMA has faced intense scrutiny in recent months, becoming a focus of the government’s frustration with regulators for inhibiting business investment in the UK. Ministers ousted the agency’s chair Marcus Bokkerink last month in a shock move, replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK, Doug Gurr.
On Thursday, Cardell acknowledged that change was needed at the CMA, but advised business “against spending an awful lot of time lobbying into government on individual deals”, warning it would not be “fruitful”.
She admitted there was an impression that the CMA’s involvement previously had a “chilling effect [on mergers] and that I have a responsibility . . . to act on that”.
She added: “There is an internal coherence and cohesion to what we’re doing. We haven’t suddenly gone into this state of erratic uncertainty.”
