The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA’s) has launched a wide-ranging consultation that it hopes will help set the agency’s “proposed priorities for the next three years and areas of focus for the next 12 months.”
In a press release, the regulator has said the latest consultation will invite “consumers, businesses and investors to help shape its priorities for the year ahead.” The Draft Action Plan especially focuses on the crucial subject of growth, with the term appearing multiple times throughout the paper.
That focus seems to be well-timed, as the UK’s financial regulators have faced increasing pressure and criticism from the government in recent months for what have been termed anti-growth policies. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is set to meet a number of the major regulators this week to re-emphasize her key message that it’s time to adopt a more pro-growth stance.
But CMA on the other hand has said: “Achieving the kind of growth that fosters opportunity and prosperity for all means ensuring the benefits of that growth are broad-based, long-lasting, and tangibly felt by people and businesses across the UK.”
Sustainable growth
According to the CMA’s latest consultation paper, a number of different factors need to come together in order to achieve broad-based and sustainable economic growth. These include:
- “a step-up in innovation, with those innovations diffusing across the economy;
- “a step-up in investment, with that investment flowing across sectors and regions;
- “a step-up in productivity, with the benefits of productivity gains accruing to consumers (through prices and quality), businesses and their investors (through returns), and employees (through wages).”
And, in defence of its own work, the regulator has argued that sustainable growth is only possible when the “foundational conditions of effective competition and empowered consumers are in place.”
The CMA says it fulfils this task by promoting choices and effective competition as well as a level playing-fields in the UK’s financial markets.
Experts believe that, after being criticized for preventing some big mergers and acquisitions from going ahead, the CMA is now following the government objective of economic growth.
Rob Mason, director of regulatory intelligence at Global Relay, says: “More direct engagement with senior leaders in commerce is a positive development which should provide a better level of information and experience.”
