Extracts from Lords debate on Brexit: Competition and State Aid (EUC Report) - May 24
Friday, 25 May 2018 07:58
Viscount Chandos (Lab):...What then should be the future in this
area after we have left the EU? It seems important that there
should be active co-operation, as the committee recommended, for
instance through a relationship with the European competition
network, and renewed and rigorous focus by the CMA. Should that
include a change to broader public interest rather than narrower
competition issues? In the speech that other noble Lords have
referred to, Michael Grenfell of the CMA posed that...Request free trial
(Lab):...What
then should be the future in this area after we have left the EU?
It seems important that there should be active co-operation, as the
committee recommended, for instance through a relationship with the
European competition network, and renewed and rigorous focus by the
CMA. Should that include a change to broader public interest rather
than narrower competition issues? In the speech that other noble
Lords have referred to, Michael Grenfell of the CMA posed that
question. I recognise that that is outside the scope of the
committee, but it is inevitably a live and important topic. As the
movie would have it, “It’s Complicated”. In 2005, there was a
proposal for Pepsi to take over Danone. The Anglo-Saxon financial
community mocked the French for treating yoghurt and mineral water
as strategic assets, but five years later we found that cream eggs
and tonic water were perhaps as strategic to us as yoghurt and
mineral water were to the French. More recently, issues surrounding
the hostile take of GKN by Melrose have brought renewed focus
on this issue. I hope that there will be continuing debate over the
months to come as we fine-tune, I hope, competition policy in the
UK post Brexit...
(Lab):...We had quite a few contributions in this debate
about whether the move away from the one-stop shop under the EU
merger control will have an effect. Clearly, it will have an
effect. We are still in the shadow of the unfortunate circumstances
of the Cadbury-Kraft and recent GKN-Melrose mergers, where public interest
has not been seen to be either effective or enduring in how it was
used to analyse and treat these mergers. My narrow point is not
that work is not going on here—I know that it is. As my noble
friend mentioned, we have already
passed in your Lordships’ House measures that have relaxed the
shares element of merger analysis and changed the conditions under
which the targeting company has to fulfil a certain share of the
market amount. At the moment, these are narrowly confined to
defence and security issues, but there is read-across to media and
to the other exemption, which is financial stability...
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