Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, whether she has had discussions with the Competition and Markets Authority on ensuring local independent retailers are not adversely affected by restrictive practices with regard to choice of stock by wholesale suppliers.

Responsibility for investigating individual and market-wide competition issues falls to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s independent competition authority. The Government has ensured that the CMA has significant powers to investigate and act if it finds that businesses are behaving anti-competitively in a market.As an independent authority, the CMA has discretion to investigate competition cases which, according to its prioritisation principles, it considers most appropriate.