Monopolies

(asked on 12th July 2021) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department has taken to put safeguards in place to ensure transparency and accountability with regard to competition in the Premier League and other monopoly-run sectors.


Answered by
Paul Scully Portrait
Paul Scully
This question was answered on 15th July 2021

An Independent Fan Led Review of Football Governance chaired by my Hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford is underway with its work. It is a root-and-branch examination of football in this country, looking at the financial sustainability of the football pyramid, governance regulations, and the merits of an independent regulator. It will also consider the current Owners’ and Directors’ test, and the transparency and accountability of that process.

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. The Government has ensured that the CMA has significant powers and expertise to investigate and take action against businesses that abuse dominant positions in markets, for instance, by unfairly excluding competitors or exploiting consumers. In the regulated sectors, these competition powers are also exercisable by the relevant sector-specific regulators. The CMA may also carry out detailed examinations of why particular markets may not be working well and take remedial action to fix features of markets which restrict competition. Most sector-specific regulators in monopoly sectors have a legal duty to promote competition for the benefit of consumers (or equivalent).

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