Greater rigour or streamlined efficiency? Confusion about the real purpose of the looming merger of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Competition Commission (CC) perhaps explains the ambivalent reaction to the proposals announced on 15 March. Because, as competition advisers have argued since the Government floated the idea of unifying the antitrust agencies last October, those aims can easily come into conflict.
Nevertheless, the Government plans to replace the two bodies by April 2014 with the new Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and claims to be able to deliver on both goals. As such, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has rejected most of the radical options on the table, such as mandatory merger approval or a move to a US-style prosecutorial model in which regulators put their case before a judge. The basic approach is to fold the CC into the larger OFT rather than attempt a structural overhaul of competition enforcement while handing moderate, but not inconsiderable, extra powers to the new body. The single body will run the full range of competition policy from merger control to market investigations and cartel enforcement.
