Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment his Department has made of (a) the adequacy of competition in the ports sector and (b) the ability of customers to switch between different ports.

Under competition law, responsibility for investigating individual and market-wide competition issues falls to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s competition authority. If an individual is concerned about the conduct of individual ports, or the state of competition in the market as a whole, these concerns can be submitted to the CMA. The Government has ensured that the CMA has significant powers to investigate and act if it finds that a company has abused its dominant position within a market. As an independent authority, the CMA has discretion to investigate competition cases which, according to its prioritisation principles, it considers most appropriate. The CMA also has powers to conduct detailed examinations of why particular markets may not be working well, and decide what remedial action is appropriate.