The development of British competition law: a complete overhaul and harmonization

The paper analyses the development of competition law in the United Kingdom by reference to four separate regimes, each with its own rules, scope of application and mode of application, though to some extent overlapping: (1) the common law doctrine of restraint of trade (affecting, primarily in practice, restrictions on the activities of employees after the ending of their employment and of vendors of businesses after completion of the sale); (2) the monopolies and mergers legislation (creating a body of administrative law and practice, with eventual power vested in the government to remedy public interest detriments resulting from a wide range of monopolistic situations and ant- competitive practices as well as to prohibit such mergers as still fall within the competence of national authorities within the EU); (3) the restrictive trade practices and resale price maintenance legislation (creating a legal, court-based system for prohibiting defined categories of restrictive trading agreements and resale price maintenance, subject to exemptions granted by the specialist court established by the legislation); (4) the rules on competition of the European Communities (primarily Articles 85 and 86 of the EC Treaty which prohibit respectively anti-competitive agreements etc., subject to exemption by the EC Commission, and abuse of a dominant position by one or more undertakings; and, since 1989, the EC Merger Control Regulation governing all concentrations having a Community dimension. Finally the paper discusses the impact of the UK Competition Act 1998 which modifies (2) above and substantially sweeps away (3) above, creating new rules which will bring UK competition law and practice broadly into line with EC competition law.