CMA Chair Pledges Predictable Regulation Without Pulling Back on Enforcement

Key Takeaways

• Regulatory Predictability: CMA Chair Doug Gurr pledged to maintain a stable and predictable regulatory regime while continuing to enforce competition and consumer law.
• Pace and Process: The CMA will continue embedding its “4Ps” of pace, predictability, proportionality and process, with Gurr pointing to shorter merger pre-notification periods and faster clearance decisions.
• Merger Enforcement: Gurr rejected suggestions that the UK is entering an “open season” for mergers, saying the CMA will continue to block or remedy anti-competitive transactions while targeting intervention where concerns arise.
• Digital Markets: The CMA highlighted interventions involving Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as evidence that its emphasis on proportionality does not mean stepping away from enforcement.
• Procurement and Growth: The regulator is expanding its role as an adviser on competition policy, including public procurement, where it estimates bid-rigging could cost UK taxpayers up to £3.5 billion annually.

Deep Dive

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority will seek to give businesses greater certainty over how it regulates while maintaining its willingness to intervene against anti-competitive conduct, Chair Doug Gurr said Wednesday, setting out three commitments for the beginning of his five-year term.

Speaking at the International Chambers of Commerce UK Competition Conference in London, Gurr pledged to maintain a stable and predictable regulatory regime, continue improving the way the CMA operates and make the authority as transparent as possible about its approach. The commitments come as the regulator continues to refine how it handles mergers, digital markets and consumer protection while taking a more active role in the government’s broader competition and growth agenda.

The emphasis on predictability does not signal a retreat from enforcement. Gurr said the CMA would continue to take action against anti-competitive conduct and breaches of consumer law, and stressed that predictable regulation should not be mistaken for predictable outcomes. Individual decisions will remain independent and evidence-based.

What the CMA wants to reduce is a different kind of uncertainty: whether the rules might change unexpectedly, whether a transaction falls within its jurisdiction, how an investigation will proceed and how long that process will take.

“It’s hard to invest if you believe the goal posts may move at any moment,” Gurr said, according to his published speaker’s notes.

For companies making investments that may take 10, 20 or even 30 years to mature, those questions have consequences well beyond the regulatory process itself. Gurr’s case was that effective regulation should fix as many of those variables as it reasonably can. The outcome of a case may remain uncertain. The ground beneath it should not.

The speech came almost a year after Gurr addressed the same conference on competition, growth and household prosperity. Much has changed in the intervening months. Advances in artificial intelligence continue to reshape the technological and investment landscape, geopolitical uncertainty persists, and the UK has a new prime minister. Gurr himself has moved from interim to permanent chair of the CMA.

That last change has altered the horizon against which he sees the job. An interim leader, he said, naturally asks what can be accomplished immediately. Permanence raises a different question: what kind of institution will be left behind?

The answer begins with the CMA’s three-year strategy, published at the end of 2025. Its foundation is deliberately conservative in one sense. The regulator’s mandate has not changed. It remains responsible for promoting competition and protecting consumers, with decisions taken independently and objectively. But the CMA has paired that continuity with another principle: the way it exercises those powers must be grounded in the real economy and produce tangible benefits for UK businesses, citizens and growth.

That leaves the regulator trying to do two things that can sit uneasily together if handled badly: enforce the law firmly enough that the rules mean something, while administering it predictably enough that businesses can plan around them.

Gurr’s argument was that the two need not be enemies. A predictable regulator is not one that promises a favorable answer. It is one that makes clear how the answer will be reached.

Changing the Experience of Regulation

Much of the CMA’s recent work has therefore concentrated not on rewriting its mandate, but on the mechanics through which that mandate reaches businesses. The authority has organized those efforts around its “4Ps”: pace, predictability, proportionality and process. Gurr said the framework is being embedded across the CMA, with progress to be measured through its annual reports.

The mergers regime offers the clearest evidence of what that looks like in practice. The CMA’s mergers charter sets expectations for how businesses will engage with the regulator and includes key performance indicators for reaching important milestones. According to Gurr, those changes have already produced significantly shorter pre-notification periods and faster clearance decisions.

The change is also showing up in what companies tell the regulator after the process is over. Gurr said parties that once complained that the CMA was slow now sometimes describe it as one of the fastest regulators, while criticism that the process was burdensome has given way in some cases to descriptions of it as streamlined. The investigations remain thorough, he said, but businesses have better visibility into why detailed information is being requested.

There is still room to improve. The CMA’s first stakeholder survey, published in July, found that 83% of respondents rated their interactions with the authority as “good,” while also identifying areas where the regulator could go further in applying the 4Ps. The CMA has meanwhile expanded its engagement through its Consumer Forum and Growth and Investment Council, drawing businesses, investors and consumer voices more directly into its thinking.

Behind those meetings is a broader change in how the CMA describes its place in the economy. Enforcement begins after something has gone wrong. Competition policy need not.

The authority increasingly wants to use its expertise upstream, advising government on policies capable of producing competitive, innovative and resilient markets before intervention becomes necessary. Gurr described the CMA as an “enabler” of competition as well as an enforcer.

Public procurement is where that ambition becomes tangible. The UK government spends roughly £400 billion each year buying goods, services and infrastructure from the private sector. That purchasing power can build markets as surely as regulation can shape them, but it also creates opportunities for waste when competition fails. The CMA estimates that bid-rigging can increase procurement prices by 20% or more and, on what it calls conservative assumptions, could be costing taxpayers as much as £3.5 billion annually.

Two CMA reports published last week examined procurement in the national interest and the cost of bid-rigging. Among the issues identified was the burden placed on smaller British companies trying to compete for government contracts.

The consequences of getting that balance wrong do not end with paperwork. A requirement that appears modest from the government’s side of a procurement process may be enough to keep a startup from bidding at all. The CMA wants requirements reviewed against competition, innovation, business dynamism and sovereignty, while encouraging government to become more comfortable accepting some risk where doing so gives innovative companies room to test, scale and commercialize new technologies.

It is an unusually expansive conception of what a competition regulator can contribute. The CMA is not proposing to abandon enforcement for industrial policy. It is arguing that the expertise accumulated through enforcement can be useful before a case ever arrives.

The Merger Question

There was, however, one point Gurr plainly did not want mistaken.

“It is not open season for mergers.”

The CMA has faced scrutiny over whether its emphasis on growth, investment and proportionality signals a softer approach to dealmaking. Gurr rejected that interpretation. The authority will continue to block or remedy transactions where it concludes that competition would be harmed. What has changed is its emphasis on directing resources toward the relatively small number of deals that raise material concerns for UK consumers and businesses.

Last year, the CMA reviewed 32 merger cases, a historically low number that Gurr said likely reflected weaker deal activity. Twenty-four were cleared unconditionally. Five were cleared with remedies, one was found not to qualify and two were prohibited. The underlying legal test remains whether a merger will lead to a substantial lessening of competition. What the CMA must also determine is where that competition actually exists.

For a hairdresser, veterinary practice or food retailer, Gurr noted, the relevant market is likely to be local or national. Other industries no longer fit so neatly inside borders. As markets become more global, the CMA says it is willing to consider that reality when deciding both how competition operates and whether the UK regulator is best placed to act.

And where a transaction can be cleared, Gurr said, it should be — either outright or with effective remedies. The authority has also updated guidance on how it assesses rivalry-enhancing efficiencies, the benefits that can make a merged company a stronger competitor rather than a weaker one.

The preferred metaphor within the CMA has become a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Gurr carried that principle from mergers directly into the authority’s digital markets work. There, too, he confronted suggestions that proportionality amounts to restraint toward powerful technology companies.

The CMA’s record, he argued, says otherwise. The regulator has made three strategic market status designations and pointed to changes involving Google and Apple’s mobile ecosystems, interventions in Google Search, voluntary cloud agreements with Amazon and Microsoft, and its more recent investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem. Its Google Search work includes what Gurr described as a world-first requirement allowing publishers to opt out of having their content used to power AI features and train AI models.

What has changed is the regulator’s willingness to distinguish between the result it wants and the procedural route used to get there. Conduct requirements remain available where warranted. But where commitments from companies can produce an effective outcome faster, the CMA is prepared to use them rather than insist upon a formal legal process for its own sake.

Consumer protection is following much the same philosophy. Since the CMA’s new powers came into force, it has opened investigations into 20 businesses, issued millions of pounds in fines and secured hundreds of thousands of pounds in refunds for customers. Recent work has included compensation for hundreds of customers whose heating-oil contracts were cancelled following conflict in the Middle East, as well as three investigations into drip pricing. The authority said it will continue concentrating enforcement on conduct that is especially harmful to consumers, particularly in essential spending and circumstances where people are most vulnerable.

For businesses, the significance of Gurr’s speech lies less in any single enforcement policy than in the bargain the CMA is trying to establish around all of them. It is not promising companies that regulation will be light. It is promising that regulation should be legible.

There is a meaningful difference. Markets can absorb adverse decisions. Companies alter transactions, abandon investments, change products and revise plans. What is harder to price is uncertainty about the process itself: which rules will matter, when jurisdiction will attach, how long an investigation will take and whether the criteria used today will still govern tomorrow.

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