Update on our approach to market interventions

At the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), we promote competition and protect consumers with a clear end goal – driving economic growth and improving household prosperity.

Our market reviews, studies and investigations are 3 powerful tools here: they allow us to examine entire markets and find opportunities to make them work better for everyone.

Our journey through the 4Ps

In July 2025, our Chief Executive Sarah Cardell explained why we are transforming our approach to market interventions. She highlighted the fundamental changes we have been making to ensure our work supports economic growth, reduces uncertainty for businesses and investors, and delivers better outcomes for everyone.

Central to this is our new framework, shaped by feedback from stakeholders and built around the 4Ps:

pace – acting more swiftly to deliver timely outcomes predictability – providing clarity on our processes and expectations proportionality – ensuring our actions are balanced and targeted process – improving how we engage with stakeholders throughout our work

Alongside Sarah’s blog post we published our updated approach to markets work, which set out how we will apply the 4Ps through a project’s full life cycle and beyond.

We have already started to embed our 4Ps approach in our ongoing work, such as our civil engineering for road and rail market study, which aims to improve outcomes in road and rail infrastructure – a sector that not only impacts consumers directly, but is also vital to driving economic growth.

New markets regime guidance

Today we’ve taken another step to fully embed the 4Ps, by publishing new guidance on how we carry out our markets work. This guidance consolidates our approach into 1 document, largely replacing all of our existing guidance documents. It will apply to all new market reviews, market studies and market investigations.

In the new guidance, we have made a series of interconnected changes to deliver improvements consistent with the 4Ps. The changes include the following.

we will publish a project roadmap at the outset of each market review, study or investigation to provide a more predictable, transparent and open approach to how we intend to run each markets project sector expertise and experience may be brought in to help us develop our understanding of the market at pace, allowing us to move more quickly to assessing and addressing concerns in the market enhanced and earlier engagement with parties will support a participative approach to our markets work, provide parties with greater predictability on next steps and greater visibility on possible concerns at an earlier stage of markets work we will use ‘sunset’ clauses as a default, meaning that the remedies we impose after a market investigation will fall away after a set period, unless the CMA judges that there is good reason for them to remain in place

The guidance also gives:

more clarity on how we use remedy trials – these should benefit businesses and consumers by allowing us to test the way information remedies are implemented before they are fixed and very unlikely to change updated information about remedy reviews, which can reduce burdens on business where remedies are no longer needed – including on broad-based ‘strategic reviews’ like the one we launched last month that covers 33 market remedies What stakeholders told us

We consulted on draft guidance last year to get valuable feedback from stakeholders – thank you to everyone who responded.

Many responses welcomed us adopting the 4Ps in our markets work, and supported us consolidating our guidance into 1 document. We were encouraged by comments that supported the aims of the guidance, and recognised the clarity we are looking to give. It was also noted our proposed changes reflected pragmatic, long-term thinking and a readiness to adapt our processes where necessary.

Some responses suggested that we elaborate on certain areas and give specific examples. Listening to this feedback, we have added more detail where appropriate.

A new regime to come?

While the legislation that governs our markets work provides statutory time limits, this still means a market study could last up to 12 months, followed by a market investigation of up to 18 or 24 months. We are clear that an end-to-end process lasting, in some cases, up to 3 years is not consistent with minimising unnecessary burdens and uncertainty on businesses in nearly all cases. We must seek to complete our work as quickly as possible.

The UK government has launched a consultation on proposed reforms to the competition regime, including changes to our markets work. The proposals to change our markets regime include:

replacing the existing market study and market investigation model with a new single-phase market review tool measures to ensure market remedies remain necessary and proportionate a new decision-making model for the markets and mergers regimes, to enhance the CMA Board’s involvement and accountability while safeguarding CMA independence from government in its decision making

The CMA welcomes these proposals, which build on our 4Ps programme, and would further enhance our work which helps secure well-functioning markets that serve the interests of the whole of the UK.

There may need to be changes to our new markets regime guidance in future, if changes to the markets regime are enacted. However, we believe the core of the approach adopted in this guidance – reflecting as it does our commitment to delivering impact at pace while minimising burdens – is the right one and will endure.

https://competitionandmarkets.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/03/update-on-our-approach-to-market-interventions/

seen at 10:44, 3 February in Competition and Markets Authority.