I support my noble friend Lord Whitty. He and the Minister, no doubt, will recall that when the Bill was going through the other place the then Minister, Mr Norman Lamb—I think that he now has a different post—got into a lot of discussion, because many people were concerned that the only interest of the consumer that was being expressed or mentioned was the consumer’s short-term interest. You can find references in Hansard, when this was being discussed in the other place, where the Minister emphasised
more than once that we must be especially interested in the long-term interests of the consumer. These amendments are concerned with that.
Clearly you can have a merger which, in the short-term interest of the consumer, would seem to be a bad thing. A merger can lead to less competition when a company, rather than battling with other companies in the same field, is no longer inhibited by the competition from the company with which it is merging. We and the relevant regulatory bodies, especially the CMA, need to be concerned with the long-term interest. That is what matters in the long run. What immediately occurs this year or next year may be very unimportant compared with what it leads to. We want to know what are the long-term interest and benefit, or the disbenefit, to the consumer. That is what will count in the long run.
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