King's Speech 2026: Competition Reform Bill

• The Government is committed to promoting competition and ensuring markets work well for consumers and businesses. Strong competition is a check on excessive market power. It helps keep prices low, improves choice for consumers, and supports higher productivity and living standards.

• Clear, predictable competition enforcement underpins growth by giving businesses confidence to invest and innovate. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has already made changes to improve how it works, focusing on taking decisions more quickly, using its powers proportionately, being clearer and more predictable in its approach, and improving how it engages with businesses.

• This Bill will deliver further reforms to support the CMA's operational transformation, to make competition investigations faster and more predictable, reduce unnecessary burdens on businesses, and ensure consumers benefit sooner, while protecting the CMA's independence.

What does the Bill do?

• Over the past 18 months, the CMA has made significant changes to how it operates and has reshaped its approach across its competition and consumer tools to focus on pace, predictability, proportionality and process. This has included moving more quickly to reach decisions, engaging earlier and more clearly with businesses, and using its powers in a more targeted and proportionate way. These reforms have improved transparency for businesses and investors, reduced uncertainty, and strengthened confidence in the system.
• Earlier this year, the Government launched a consultation on how to go further to improve the UK's competition system, so it continues to work well for consumers, businesses and the wider economy. The final details of the legislation will be shaped by this consultation and build on the CMA's ongoing improvements.
• Together, these changes will help ensure the UK remains one of the best places in the world to do business, while maintaining strong protections against excessive market power for the benefit of consumers.

• The Bill will:

Improve decision-making at the CMA. It will deliver a new and more consistent decision-making model, making the chain of accountability clearer. Under the current system, some of the most significant CMA decisions are led by an independent CMA Panel, and members of the CMA Board are legally prevented from engaging in these decisions. This can make it harder to ensure consistency and predictability in decision-making, and clear accountability at the most senior level. The Panel model is unique to the UK and difficult to explain to international businesses and the wider UK public when describing who is accountable for CMA Phase 2 merger and market investigation decisions. The Bill will give the CMA Board a role in decisions on mergers and market investigations, improving accountability to Parliament, businesses and the public. We will ensure appropriate governance and procedural safeguards to maintain expert decision-making that is independent of government.

Territorial extent and application

TheBill willextend and applyacross the UK.

Key facts

• The CMA is the UK's primary consumer and competition authority. In the three years to 2024-25, the annual average direct consumer saving resulting from the CMA's work was £3 billion (CMA Annual Report 2024-25).
• For every £1 spent on the CMA by UK taxpayers, the CMA has returned over

£24 in savings to consumers over the last 3 years (CMA Annual Report 2024-25).

• Multinational technology company International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) said “These changes have the potential to make the UK regime clearer and easier to navigate for businesses while retaining the CMA's ability to intervene where intervention is justified.”
• The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) said “We welcome the government's focus on pace, predictability, proportionality, and process. These objectives matter greatly to SMEs. For smaller firms, uncertainty itself can operate as a significant cost and barrier to growth.”