My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 24M. Amendment 24L deals with what issues the CMA will have to take into account when dealing with completed mergers. The principle should also apply to prospective mergers. When asking whether competition is lessened, as the clauses refer to, we need to consider why we want competition to be maintained or increased. Competition is not, in my view, an end in itself; it is about the efficiency of the newly created entity, its ability to compete—globally, in some instances—and whether it is in the long-term interests of consumers. In the vast majority of cases, the long-term interests of consumers are served by more competition rather than less. Therefore, lessening competition can be, and usually is, a detriment to consumers, but there are instances where that is not the case. Not all competition results in benefits to consumers.
Mergers can often reduce competition but sometimes manage to increase customer service and improve the way in which customers regard to the supplier of the product or service. Unravelling mergers, particularly completed mergers, could, on occasion, result in less customer service. Hence, as well as a straightforward
metric on what share of the market is covered by an already completed merger, we need to assess what the future of the new entity will be in terms of its long-term global competitiveness, which may not be relevant in all markets, but will be relevant in quite a few, and, in all markets, what is the effect on long-term consumer benefit of detriment. That needs to be written into the Bill. It should not be just a question of the metric of market share.
Amendment 24M also deals with consumer interests. Clause 23 deals with the investigative powers of the CMA. It includes provisions which are three and a half pages long but do not mention consumers once. Clause 23(2) deals with permitted purposes—that is, on what grounds investigations can take place. The amendment simply suggests that one of those permitted purposes ought to be in order to investigate situations when the CMA gets complaints or references from consumer organisations, specifically from those organisations which are designated as having super-complaint powers—that is, they can bring a worked-up super-complaint under present legislation to the OFT or the Competition Commission.
Designated bodies include Which?. They also include Citizens Advice and for the time being Consumer Focus. We will argue separately for a role for small businesses. A super-complaint has to be investigated. To get to that stage the consumer organisations must have a fully worked-out case. There are a number of cases that the OFT has looked into. I have a list here, which includes the supply of beer in UK pubs. Apparently CAMRA is a designated consumer organisation, which I had forgotten and am gratified to hear. We brought in a case when I was chair of the National Consumer Council and Consumer Focus on home credit. Citizens Advice first raised payment protection insurance, which is now a huge consumer issue, with its knock-on effect on other areas of consumer detriment yet to be completely resolved. There are a large number of super-complaints that have been considered over the last five years or so.
Consumer organisations also receive information about things that do not really amount to a super-complaint, or that would take too long, or that are too complex to turn into a super-complaint. At the moment the Bill covers neither the situation with super-complaints leading to an investigation nor complaints raised by designated consumer organisations that are short of a super-complaint. Amendment 24M deals with that situation. It deals with it under the mergers section and should also logically apply to the markets situation. These two amendments would embed more reference to consumers and the way in which consumers and consumer organisations can get into this competition system. I beg to move.