On 23 May 2024, over a year since its introduction to Parliament, the DMCC Bill was rushed through before the proroguing of Parliament ahead of the July UK General Election.  It received Royal Assent the following day.

To bring a collective competition action in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (“CAT”), a proposed class representative first has to have their claim certified by the CAT. The CAT’s approach to certification is therefore an important issue and has been heavily scrutinised.  In this Insight, we look at three recent judgments of the Competition Appeal Tribunal where the CAT has stalled the progression of the claims: Gormsen v Meta Platforms, Inc., Justin Gutmann v Apple Inc., and Commercial and Interregional Card Claims.  We consider the factors that led to these decisions, which buck the trend over the last two years of class representatives achieving certification of their claims with relative ease, and set out our thoughts on the key learnings from the judgments.

On 25 April 2023, the UK Government published the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill. In this Insight, we consider three key aspects of this draft legislation that are of particular relevance to the private enforcement of competition law in the UK: provisions enabling private actions to be brought against any person that has breached a ‘relevant requirement’ under the new regulatory regime for digital markets that the Bill introduces; the route for decisions made by the CMA exercising its new digital markets functions to be challenged by undertakings designated by the CMA as having strategic market status or by any person with a sufficient interest in the decision; and the planned expansion of the jurisdiction of the Competition Appeal Tribunal to grant declaratory relief and award exemplary damages in competition claims.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has handed down a judgment determining several preliminary issues in the £17 billion collective action brought against Mastercard in relation to anti-competitive multilateral interchange fees, following on from the European Commission’s infringement Decision.  In this Insight, we discuss the Tribunal’s rejection of Mastercard’s argument that it could rely on a counterfactual scenario premised on the interchange fees having been set at a lower, lawful level, thereby limiting the claimants’ recoverable losses. We consider in particular the Tribunal’s ruling that this argument was precluded by the binding effect of the decision, or alternatively, by the argument constituting an abuse of process given that Mastercard did not advance it before the Commission.