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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has been made of the effect on competition policy of port operators in Scotland being subsidiaries of larger port companies in England.

Under competition law, responsibility for investigating individual and market-wide competition issues falls to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s independent competition authority. The CMA, which works independently from BEIS, has discretion to investigate competition cases which it considers most appropriate according to its prioritisation principles. Concerns about a market and evidence that features of a market may prevent, restrict or distort competition in UK markets can be submitted to the CMA via the following page: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem.